The Adafruit Feather ecosystem is so rich with hardware diversity, we wanted to share them, one each day. Today is the Adafruit Latching Mini Relay FeatherWing!
This is the Latching Mini Relay FeatherWing. It gives you power to control, and control over power. Put simply, you can now turn on and off lamps, fans, solenoids, and other small appliances that run on up to 250VAC or DC power using any Feather board.
Using our Feather Stacking Headers or Feather Female Headers you can connect a FeatherWing on top of your Feather board and let the board take flight. Check out our range of Feather boards here.
There are two ‘flavors’ of these FeatherWings, this is the Latching relay. This one requires two pins, a SET and UNSET and instead of keeping the SET pin high, you only have to pulse each pin high for 10ms to latch the relay open or closed. You need two pins but save power. Note, if power is lost, the relay will stay in the last setting.
The other type of relay FeatherWing is the simple Non-Latching relay, it requires only a single signal pin.
Both FeatherWings use the same family of relay. You can switch up to 2A of resistive current at 30VDC or ~40VAC or lower. At 110VDC you can switch up to 0.6A, at 120VAC up to 0.5A, and at 250VAC you can switch up to 0.3A. Check the datasheet for the relay for the exact switching capacity, and of course, for reactive/inductive loads you will need to derate. This isn’t a relay you can use to turn on and off your washer/dryer, stick to 60W or less. For up to 1200W devices, check out our Power Featherwing which can handle up to 10A!
Each FeatherWing comes with a fully assembled and tested PCB, header you can use to attach to your feather. You also get a 3-pin terminal block you can use to wire up whatever you are going to be relay-controlling. Some light soldering is required.
USE
The Adafruit Mini Relays FeatherWing Guide provides details and use examples.
Projects
Would you like to see this FeatherWing in action? Check out the project below:
