When the trap has dropped the circuit pulls its own plug as it were, and needs you to reactivate it (and squish the roach) manually.
Rgds
Damon
I've thought about that, but relays require power. Also, after the trap has tripped, the reptile inside may move around and keep retriggering the circuit all to no avail, hence the need for the entire circuit to be turned off.
David[ Parent ]
But the power to the relay coil can come through normally-open contacts in parallel with the rest of the circuit.
Once the contacts get opened no more power drawn by the coil or the rest of the circuit.
It depends on the duty-cycle, ie what fraction of the time you expect the circuit to be armed and waiting vs brooding with a bug in its bowels.
Damon[ Parent ]
The system needs to be active from the time the last person in the household goes to bed - say midnight - until about 5am when I get up every morning in the summer time, or, 5.30 am when I get up in the winter.
On time is around 5 hours so there must be a circuit that can cope with this and consume minimum battery power.
Cockroaches are normally given the size 8 shoe, but geckos are useful creatures and eat ants and mosqitos etc. I never kill these amazing little reptiles and only want to catch them and then transport them several streets away so they can live somewhere else. Catching insects is not a problem with geckos; its their crap that they leave on their 'runs' which I consider a hygiene problem, hence my desire to catch and release them.
David HK[ Parent ]
Well, some relays use very little power, but consider a power FET which need take practically no power at all (down to nanoamps) to be held 'on' depending how you do it.
Or have the logic run on CMOS (4xxx series, good from ~3V to 18V) with a latched output to disable the power to the rest of the circuit, manually resettable. Look at something like the 4007 + pull-up resistor + P-channel power MOSFET to gate power to the rest of your system.
Microamps should cover that when inactive.
