Push Button Start

Here are the pictures of the final module right before installation:

The enclosure is made by Hammond Manufacturing - a very high quality on the shelf enclosure.  I purchase them through Mouser.com (good guess profuse!)

I use two different companies for circuit boards, one place called www.PCBPro.com and the other is called www.4PCB.com.  I believe that 4PCB made the prototype board in the first pictures and PCBPro made the finished board above.  In my experiance, 4PCB is a great place for prototype low quantity boards (<10).  PCBPro seems to be a bit better with bigger production runs.

You can get circuit board layout software for free on the 'net, or you can spend a ton of money and get a nice package.  I use a free program from www.freepcb.com.  It doesn't have any advanced features, but the price is right and my boards are small enough that I can manually route everything with minimal issues.

The basic steps in a process like this is to first find an enclosure you want to use for the final product.  You can then create the circuit board layout in the software package that will fit the enclosure.  You then add all the components you need and make all the copper traces.  Next, you Email the file created by the software package to the company that you pick to make the boards.  For a small prototype run you can expect to have the boards within a week.  For a bigger production run it can take up to 5 weeks (depends on how much $$$ you want to spend.)

No Ph.D here, I only have a bachelors degree (in electronics) and a lot of motivation and willingness to learn about new things.  I learned all about making circuit boards the hard, expensive way - trial and error.  The first batch I ever ordered - 100 boards - were pretty worthless because I didn't lay my ground paths out correctly.  Making them manually truely is an art, and you can spend hours upon hours upon hours perfecting a board.

Yeah, the actual starting part isn't hard.

The challanges from this particular module were:

Stopping the car with the push button

The actual starter output is just a 500mA output driving a relay, just like a typical remote start.  Since the key is needed to be turned in the ignition to defeat the mechanical wheel lock I left out the ignition output.  I could have added it and then the key wouldn't need to be in the 'on' position, but you are already putting it in and turning it so there really isn't a point that I could see.

Er, it's Kevin!

Not sure why, but many, many people call me Ken, which is actually my Father's name!