wiring for remote seat heater activation?

Well, I've been considering installing some seat heaters in my car. I think they'd really be nice on those days when the temperature is right on the border of being comfortable with the top down (and when it's like that, it is always still down.)

Then also, I got to thinking, if I put in seat heaters, it shouldn't be that hard to take the aux output channels from my compustar alarm, and wire them up so in the winter I could click on the seat heaters a few minutes before I get in the car. Excessive I know, but I've always been itching to find something cool to do with those aux outputs.

I was thinking I could put each seat on its own channel, so I could just warm up the driver's seat when it will just be me in the car. The only thing is, I can't quite figure out the wiring for it. Basically I'd need one hell of a long timer for this type of thing. But I think I would like to get them on a timer, so if I ever hit a button on accident, the heaters don't just drain the battery, which I doubt would take that long. However, the car does have an Optima red top in place of the tiny stock Miata battery, so I would think it could run seat heaters on its own for a few minutes at a time.

As far as the technical side of it goes, I know the aux outputs are programmable from a pulse of 1 to I believe 99 seconds, or something fairly long. Still not long enough, but would I be able to find a capacitor big enough that it could be charged up for a little while by the momentary pulse (technically by a relay acted on by the pulse) and then slowly drain in 5-10 minutes, holding a relay shut to keep the heaters going? Or would I need such a large capacitor for that that it would be a little cumbersome to try to make it work? I was also wondering how manufacturers make defroster timers work, maybe something like that could do what I want?

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'96 Mazda Miata

Looking around, I did find this diagram...



I think this could work with a much larger capacitor, but I don't fully understand how the circuit works, particularly what the resistors are there for. Could anyone explain and tell me if this is something that could work for me?

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'96 Mazda Miata

Most of the heated seats that we install is a ON-OFF toggle switch. You need to program the OUTPUT of the AUX channel to latched and have it wired up to a relay like this and it will activate the heated seats for you. Just make sure you press the AUX button again to deactivate the trigger.

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Jeff
Velocity Custom Home Theater
Mobile Audio/Video Specialist
Morden, Manitoba CANADA

Hmm, still a little risk of accidentally turning them on and not knowing until the battery goes dead, but a lot simpler. Can I set the outputs to latched? It's a compustar 2WSSA. Don't know where the manual is.

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'96 Mazda Miata