12v trigger power bar

Recently with my amp shuffle my audio power on sequence got a lot smoother, in fact – I was actually being pretty lazy sometimes and just not even bothering to power on the sub amp if the movie wasn’t an action film (terrible I know). What I needed was a 12v triggered powerbar.

Of course, I decided that the best way would be to build one myself. I could have tried to fiddle around with X10 (I have an IR->X10 box) but in the past I’ve found that X10 can be a bit random, and I’ve decided that X10 isn’t really a good solution for my needs. [when I finally get around to lighting and fix the bare bulbs I’ve got in my room I’ll be using a lutron graphic eye] The commercial solutions from Monster seem costly, and I like to make stuff anyways..

My local electronics stores carry NTE parts, so that’s what I used – if you want to build one yourself, equivalent parts should be relatively easy to get. The heart of the project is the RS3-1D10-51 a solid state relay (SSR). Now my SSR is only rated for 10amps, so I need to add a fuse or breaker to protect it as I’m plugging it into the wall current which has a 15amp breaker on it. The R59-10A seemed like a good choice. So then I needed a 3.5mm mini mono jack to allow me to connect this to my 12v trigger line, and some parts from HomeDepot (power cord, box, electrical outlet).

First step was to wire it up and check that the SSR was doing what I needed it to do. I plugged a lamp into the outlet and used a battery as the 12v trigger power source. The SSR works great, like magic, applying a low voltage across the terminals resulted in the light coming on – no click, no fuss – just the light. Very cool.

After that it was just a matter of making it all pretty inside the box – which involved some careful planning to get all the parts in and wiring it up. Now my transcoder and sub amp will both come on via the same 12v trigger that drives my power amps. So when I watch stuff, the sub will always come on along with the other power amps.  Total cost was somewhere around $60 (half of that was the SSR) and it took a few hours to put together.