Re: [WhatsUp Forum] Contact Closures

[Keith Johnson]

It was just a poor description -- made sense to me :-)  The box was 
modified so one of the jacks had no hot or neutral, essentially an isolated 
dead jack. I added a small circuit into the box that, when the reboot 
sequence was sent to the port, the neutral leg of the port provided a timed 
connection to ground. The grounded connection would force an attached alarm 
system to go into a "reboot" cycle (a long enough cycle that allowed the 
other AC powered devices to get power cycled and startup before the alarm 
would trigger). Believe it or not there was actually a good reason for this 
Rube Goldberg though it could have done easier with an external relay. I 
have a bad habit of getting into the nuts-n-bolts.

kj

At 05:48 PM 9/25/2003 -0400, you wrote:
Keith,

Maybe you just described things wrong, but in case you did not:

WARNING!
The ground connection should never be broken to switch an AC line
powered device. Switches go in the hot line, NEVER the neutral or
ground. Leaving the hot connected and breaking the ground/neutral
could makes the device case or other metal parts, electrically hot and
could pose a SEVERE electrical hazard to people!
Dan Donnelly
No, I'm not an electrician, but have several in my family and my
background is in electronics which deals with all kinds of electrical
things. And I have been shocked (physically and emotionally) by just
this situation!
----- Original Message -----
From: "Keith Johnson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Thursday, September 25, 2003 4:49 PM
Subject: Re: [WhatsUp Forum] Contact Closures
> Remote power boot box is what I used -- though SNMP was not used to
control
> the box. I modified one of the ac ports on a western telematic box
to
> provide ground / open and access the box using ssh. If you're unsure
about
> dealing with such a box at a component level, hooking up an external
relay
> to the AC port is certainly possible and relatively easy.
>
> kj


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