Questions about solenoid control

[jonahpearl]

Hi all, two questions about solenoid control.

1. For the standard 12V Lee solenoids that are recommended for water delivery, do I insert the leads into the GND and SOL ports on the Poke board?

2. My lab has some Lee solenoids that are 5V and quiet that we like for controlling odors, that we would like to use with pyControl. I don't understand how 5V vs. 12V maps onto the different power lines POW_A, POW_B, etc. I tried poking around in the code to see if it's established somewhere (e.g. when you use a Poke board, if it sets the line for the solenoid specifically to 12V), but I couldn't tell. Are some of the lines hard-coded at 5V, or is there a way to tell the system to use 5V power? Ideally, we will have three 5V Lee solenoids all controlled by different channels of one or two port outputs.

Thanks!

[alustig3]

There some information about the POW pins here

In general, you can hook up 5V to the positive side of your Lee solenoid, and then instead of connecting the other side of the solenoid to GND like normal, you would connect it to a POW_A or POW_B pin. The software does not know/care what voltage is driving the solenoid (the load), it is just choosing to sink the current going through the load, or not.

If you are using the Poke board specifically, POW_A is already being used to sink the current going through the white LED. So all that is left is the POW_B pin, which is labeled SOL on the Poke board. So you could connect your positive solenoid lead into the Poke board's 5V slot, and the negative solenoid lead into the slot labeled SOL.

If you want to independently control two solenoids from a single port, you could gain access the to RJ45 pins by cutting the cable and stripping the wires, or using a pyControl port adapter (GitHub, Open Ephys, LabMaker) or using a generic RJ45 breakout. The pyControl pinout is specified here.

Hope that helps. Let us know if you still have questions.

[jonahpearl]

That helps, thank you. I haven't encountered that particular set up before (turning a sink on/off), so I hadn't really understood the docs / how to use them. I think that gives me the info I need, I'll follow up with any more q's.