Using your Hauntbox

Using your Hauntbox.

Things you'll need.

1. A 12V or 24V DC power supply.
2. A formatted microSD card.
3. A wired network connection.
4. Some sensors and interesting things to hook up to the outputs.
5. A sense of adventure

Initial set up

Note: It is very important to protect the Hauntbox from shorts that could damage the sensitive electronics. Never change wiring to inputs or outputs when it is plugged into a power supply.

1. Wire your sensors to the inputs on the Hauntbox. They are along the top of the board labeled A through F.
2. Wire up the things you want to control to the outputs. They are along the bottom of the Hauntbox labeled 1 through 6. Usually these will be wired from the 5V or +V to the OC (the switched ground).
3. Plug in your network cable to the CAT5 network jack on the left side of the Hauntbox.
4. Plug in your power supply and plug it into the power jack on the left side of the Hauntbox.
5. Fire up your favorite browser and browse to http://hauntbox.local (Note that some browsers do require the "http://").
   • An aside about bonjour. If you have more than one hauntbox on the same network you must change the name to be unique on the network. This is easily done by popping the microSD card out of your Hauntbox and making a file called "bonjour.txt" on the card. Edit this with your favorite text editor (Notepad on Windows, TextEdit on Mac, nano on Linux) and make up a name less than 16 characters that only has letters and numbers. No special characters. Put the card back into your Hauntbox and reset. Now browse to "http://yourname.local"
6. First take a look at the settings tab. Rename your sensors and outputs so you can easily see what you're controlling. Be sure to click "Save" when you're done.
7. Next go the the program tab. This is where the fun is. Each row is a sentence that you fill out. Press save and see the Hauntbox do your bidding.

Input & Output details

Each input has four terminals:

1. +V This is 12V if you're using a 12V power supply or 24V if you use a 24V supply.
2. 5V This is 5V from the onboard power supply.
3. GND Ground. Should your sensors need a dedicated ground.
4. [A-F] in This is the actual input. Hook up the output of your sensor here. It is an analog pin that can accept up to 24V DC signals.
   • It is important in the settings page to select the appropriate voltage to make sure the trigger thresholds are set properly.

Each output has four terminals:

1. +V This is 12V if you're using a 12V power supply or 24V if you use a 24V supply.
2. 5V This is 5V from the onboard power supply.
3. GND Ground. Should your output need a dedicated ground.
4. OC in This is the actual switched output. It is called an "open collector" which simply means it is a switched ground that can accept a range of voltage. This is the secret sauce how you can use either a 5V, 12V or 24V device. It can handle up to 300mA, which is enough to power some solenoids, big relays, and many other things. It has solid state auto-resetting fuse to help protect your Hauntbox from mistakes.