Off - On - Momentary Switch?

Wandering around autozone this afternoon, I stumbled across those "military" switches (now apparently ricer :D edit: these), with the cover that you have to flip open before you can flip the switch, which I couldnt resist, not even knowing what i wanted to do with it. Now that I have an idea for it (which including painting the ostentatious orange cover black), but I would need a different switch (which is listed as a 12v switch, with no mention of what amperage its rated to handle :rolleyes: ) to go under the mechanism. I'm not sure exactly how to describe what im looking for, but itd be off-on-on&momentaryon, the momentary tripping a second set of poles while keeping the first set of poles on, then dropping back to just on. What I want to do is power on the inverter (N.O. On) and use the momentary to boot the pc (N.O Mom. On) in one movement. Anyone know where to find such a switch? or how to properly describe it?

I seen them constructed as a toggle or slide switch somewhere. But I guess you want a push version of it.

It is a toggle, right now its just on/off, and it looks to have a 3/8ths or 1/2 thread on the base just from eyeballing it.

Try farnell :

http://uk1.farnell.com/Search/search...html?CATID1=18

They have lots and lots in there, good luck looking for one.

I wanted to do that same thing, but I gave up on finding a momentary switch... Instead, i have a main switch in the front which powers on my inverter and one of my amps.... I found the simplest way to turn on an ATX computer... Put a 3.3uf Capacitor on your ATX case switch... One lead on one pole, one on the other. A 3.3uf would allow a short circuit just long enough to switch the computer on and then slowly energize and look like an open circuit; hence like pushing the power button for a split second; a pulse switch.

http://phillip.darktech.org/mp3box/images/P3080001.JPG

http://www.mp3car.com/usersites/Tall...r/P3080005.JPG

It works great for me so far, I turn on the front switch which instantly powers on the inverter, giving power to the ATX turn on circuit. By this time, the capacitor is charged and turns the computer on (about a 0.2 second delay) The system works great, unless you turn it on and off really fast.

http://phillip.darktech.org/mp3box/mp3box.htm

Sucky Emachine, 250mhz Cyrix MII 300, 20gb hard drive, 128mb ram, 98 Lite, 20x4 Character backlit lcd, Serial remote, winamp and lots of plugins

I like the capacitor idea, I had some other ideas.

A lot of new motherboards have the ability (with bios setup or a jumper) to basically power on as long as the unit is pluged in.

I used to use another design on my first setup with an inverter.

Basically I used a small momentary switch up front, connected to 2 relays. one smaler spst relay (coil wired to switch up front) to start pc, this relay would fire whenever the button is pressed.

the second relay was wired to momentarialy close and supply power to the inverter. in the closed position, 12v from the PC would then continue to keep the coil energized, thus continuing to feed the inverter. When the pc was powered down, the coil went dead, breaking the circuit, and cuting power to the inverter.

The only problem with this circuit was if the pc hung on shutdown. (but I threw in a reset switch for the circuit to interupt the coil if need be)

Just some ideas...

http://www.digikey.com/

try a search for Toggle.

then filter with on-on-mom.

You don't care about the first "on" so don't wire anything to it.

http://rocky.digikey.com/WebLib/C&K%...0%20Series.pdf

http://dkc3.digikey.com/PDF/T032/0835.pdf

are some examples.

Sweet! Thanks for the help. And the other two are good ideas, but I want to be able to turn my inverter on without necessicarily turning on the pc (recharging the pocket pc, phone, tools, etc).