Driving LEDs with VM110 - New to electronics

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I just got a Velleman VM110 with the intention to drive a few LEDs. I’m doing a button box for a racing simulator, the buttons are controlled by another card, but I need some LEDs to turn on to show the states of various pushbuttons.

I can program in various languages but the hardware side is voodoo magic to me :frowning:

I’ve gotten the internal LEDs to blink and all that via my own code, but now I need to connect some LEDs so they turn on when I send data to the card and that’s where I’m stuck.

From what I can tell, I need to connect an external power supply. Power supply ground, to GND on the card, and the power supply “+” to the CLAMP input on the VM110 right?

Anything else? I’m worried about feeding to much power and frying something. What kind of voltage do I need to use? For example would a 9 volt power supply work? I have a bunch of those lying around. I’ve seen the diagram that has been posted but I don’t know what things in it mean. I real picture of everything connected would be better for me I think.

Thanks for any help.

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[quote]From what I can tell, I need to connect an external power supply. Power supply ground, to GND on the card, and the power supply “+” to the CLAMP input on the VM110 right?[/quote]This is OK.
Now connect the LED with a series resistor between the CLAMP and the digital output of the VM110 card.

If you have a standard 20mA LED and 9V battery, you can use 1k series resistor. The LED current will be about 7mA in this case.

Here an example circuit diagram how to connect three LEDs:

800×459

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Thanks, got it working.

I’ve bought a couple electronics books for my kindle, learned ohm’s law and experimented a bit on a breadboard first with some tutorial projects.

It’s starting to make sense now.

Once I’ve got this button box finished I think I’m gonna get another VM110 to play around with, lots of possibilities.