inMOTION Archives - Infinitybox

Picture of the Infinitybox 20-Circuit Kit

System Current Draw

April 22, 2021/0 Comments/in Wiring /by admin

When you wire your car or truck with our Infinitybox system, you are adding a powerful electrical management system to your build. We do so much more than a traditional wiring harness. Our system has the power and intelligence to get you modern electrical control of your muscle car, restoration, street-rod, hot-rod, resto-mod, pro-touring car or race car. Your Infinitybox system is awake and alive continuously so that it can respond immediately when you want to start the car, pop your trunk from our inLINK key fobs or control the system from your smart phone.

Wiring your car with the Infinitybox system gets you features that you cannot get from any traditional wiring harness but it does require more care & feeding. Our system does have a parasitic draw on your battery when the car is sitting idle. This is different than a traditional box of fuses and relays that has no active electronics in it. We strongly recommend that you have a way to manage your battery for when you are not driving your car or truck. There are three ways you can do this.

First, we always recommend a disconnect switch at the battery. This is a quick and reliable way to disconnect the battery from your car’s electrical system. This is a good idea for any car, even if you are not using the Infinitybox system to wire your car. Other electronics systems that you add to your car, like electronic fuel injection systems, stereo equipment, will have parasitic draws from the battery. A disconnect will help to keep your battery voltage up when you’re not driving the car.

Second, we always recommend some kind of trickle charger or maintainer for your battery for when your car is sitting idle. This is true for any car, not just cars wired with our Infinitybox system. You have many options for maintainer chargers from brands like Battery Tender, CTEK and Schumacher. Battery maintainers keep your battery voltage at its optimum level when the car is idle. This will dramatically increase the life and reliability of your battery.

Lastly, our Infinitybox system has a unique accessory called inRESERVE. inRESERVE is our active battery management feature. The core of inRESERVE is a special latching solenoid that connects to a POWERCELL output. The Infinitybox system is always watching and monitoring the battery voltage. If the system sees the voltage start to get low, the POWERCELL sends a pulse to the special inRESERVE solenoid and disconnects all of the drain from the battery. We build a lot of safety features into this system. inRESERVE actively does its job if the battery drops below 12.3 volts, with the ignition off and stays at that level for 15 minutes. This video talks through inRESERVE in more detail.

inRESERVE also gets you the disconnect feature that we mentioned in our first point above. You can simply press the button included with your inRESERVE kit to disconnect the battery. This adds a great security feature and lets you shut down power if the car is going to be sitting for extended periods of time.

We get a lot of questions about how much current the different components in the Infinitybox system draw when idle. The MASTERCELL, POWERCELL and inMOTION cell each draw approximately 30 milliamps (0.03 amps) when they are powered up. Adding the inLINK option adds approximately 10 milliamps to the MASTERCELL draw. inVIRONMENT is in the range of 25 milliamps. inTOUCH NET will draw 200 to 250 milliamps.

Please contact our team with any questions about the idle current draw of our Infinitybox system. You can call us directly at (847) 232-1991 or you can click here to contact our team directly.

CAD models are available for our Infinitybox Cells in STEP and IGES

Infinitybox CAD Models

August 28, 2020/0 Comments/in Wiring /by admin

Our customers are a unique breed of builder and fabricator. They wire their cars and trucks with our Infinitybox system for a lot of different reasons. To start, our system lets them simplify their wiring. More importantly, our customers want more than just a plain, basic electrical system. They want the same electrical features in their project that they have in their new, daily driver. Our Infinitybox system lets them do that. Since our customers are tinkers, makers and builders, they are using the latest solid modeling technology to virtually mock up their cars and trucks to make the project go more smoothly. We get a lot of requests for CAD models for our cells, so we’ve made them available to our customers.

The introduction of on-line CAD tools like Audodesk’s Fusion 360 gives anyone in their garage access to very powerful and intuitive solid modeling tools. You can import the CAD models for the Infinitybox MASTERCELL, POWERCELL and inMOTION cells into your projects. You can check fitment, verify wire routing and make sure that you can access the cells, all in the computer before you cut any metal.

We have the solid models for the MASTERCELL, POWERCELL and inMOTION cells available in STEP and IGES formats. Click on this link to contact our technical support team and we will send you the models.

Outline dimensions for the Infinitybox MASTERCELL

Infinitybox Cell Outline Drawings

February 17, 2020/0 Comments/in Wiring /by admin

This blog post has the outline drawings for our Infinitybox MASTERCELL, POWERCELL and inMOTION Cell. You can use these drawings to plan the layout of these cells in your car or truck project. All of the dimensions on these drawings are in inches.

The basic footprint for the MASTERCELL, POWERCELL and inMOTION cell is exactly the same. The mounting tabs for all three cells are identical. The holes in the mounting tabs are designed for a 1/4″ X 5/8″ shoulder bolt.

Outline dimensions for the Infinitybox MASTERCELL

Outline dimensions for the Infinitybox POWERCELL

Outline dimensions for the Infinitybox inMOTION Cell

You can download PDF versions of these drawings at these links.

MASTERCELL

POWERCELL

inMOTION Cell

Click on this link to contact our technical support team if you have any additional questions about our Infinitybox system.

inMOTION Video

December 12, 2019/0 Comments/in Wiring /by admin

We just released a new video that covers the features and benefits of our inMOTION Motor Controller Cell.

The Infinitybox inMOTION Cell

inMOTION is a unique module that connects to the CAN network of your 20-Circuit Kit. It looks like a POWERCELL but acts differently. Instead of turning 10 things on and off like a POWERCELL, it reverses the polarity to 5 things. We originally designed inMOTION to control power windows and power lock actuators. Instead of relying on a switch, inMOTION has special h-bridge relays that reverse the polarity. This lets you change direction of things like power windows, power locks, linear actuators and valves.

That is just the beginning. inMOTION is smarter than a POWERCELL which means that you can get express features on your windows with no limit switches. You can also get wireless control through inLINK or a smart phone attached to inTOUCH NET.

Check out this video for a deeper dive into what inMOTION can do.

We have the solid model for the inMOTION cell available to our customers to help with their planning and mocking up process.

Click on this link to get in touch with our team with questions.

Updating inMOTION

October 11, 2016/0 Comments/in Software /by admin

One of the advantages of our Infinitybox system is that it can always be updated. We have added a lot of new features and functions over the years. The earliest systems that we sold can be updated to use these new features. In some cases, these updates require a simple hardware change that we need to do here. In the majority of these changes, it is a simple software update that can be done in your shop, garage or in the vehicle in the field. Most of the changes are done to the MASTERCELL but in some cases, the POWERCELLs and inMOTION cells need to be updated. This post is going to talk about updating inMOTION.

Before you get too far, 99.99% of our customers will never need to update inMOTION in the field. This blog post is intended to have this documented for the 0.01% of them that will. The only reason why you’d need to update inMOTION would be if we have created something custom for you in terms of the current levels for the express functions. In the overwhelming majority of cases, you can stop reading here. You need to do nothing with the code on your inMOTION unless explicitly directed by one of our technical support engineers.

inMOTION is different from a POWERCELL in a few ways. inMOTION uses special polarity reversing relays instead of MOSFETs. Also, inMOTION monitors the current flowing to the loads that it is powering. inMOTION is always comparing the actual current to a learned value. If the actual current exceeds the learned value, it shuts the output off. One of the last steps of setting up inMOTION is to train it. This is detailed in the instruction manual for inMOTION. When you update inMOTION, there are a few extra steps that you need to follow because of the current monitoring and the way inMOTION learns its current draw.

Our technical support team will let you know what cells in your system will need to be updated if we are changing the way your system operates. If you are told to update inMOTION, we will email you a new file. Please follow these steps when updating inMOTION.

Power down the entire system.
Disconnect CAN cable and output harnesses from the inMOTION cell (just leave the power connectors)
Unlike the other cells, the inMOTION cell needs power to program it, so power up the 12V feed to the cell.
Connect the programmer to the inMOTION cell and browse for the inMOTION file
Click program and wait for programmer to finish.
Once the programming is complete, remove the programmer and the blue LED on the inMOTION cell should be blinking quickly. Stop here if the Blue LED is not flashing quickly.
Remove power from the system and re-connect the CAN cable to the inMOTION (do not reconnect any motor loads yet)
Power up the entire system, wait about 10 seconds
Press and hold the train button (S11) on the inMOTION cell until the blue LED is on steady and then release. This process nulls out the current sensors in the system.
Wait for the inMOTION to cycle all of the relays.
Leaving the power on, reconnect the motor loads to the cell. The blue LED should be doing a double flash heartbeat.
Position the motors to the middle of their travel using the manual buttons on the inMOTION cell.
Press and hold the train button (S11) until the blue LED is on steady and then release. The inMOTION will cycle all of the motors and learn the current profiles.
The blue LED should have the regular heartbeat now and everything should be ready to go.

Click on this link to contact our technical support team with any questions about updating inMOTION.

Central Locking

September 27, 2016/0 Comments/in Wiring /by admin

We created our inMOTION cell about 6 years ago to handle things that need to change direction. From any MASTERCELL input, you can control power windows, lock actuators, exhaust cut-outs and other linear actuators. What makes inMOTION unique is the fact that it changes polarity from within the cell. This means that you don’t need special relays to change the polarity of the current flowing to your window motors or lock actuators. inMOTION does that for you. You can also control any of the inMOTION outputs from our inLINK key fobs and any smart device through inTOUCH NET. This post is going to show you how to wire lock actuators with Central Locking to the MASTERCELL and inMOTION cell.

There are lots of ways to control door lock actuators. In most cases, our customers want to unlock their doors when they disable security from their inLINK key fobs. That’s easy. From the inside of the car, they usually want switches that lock and unlock the doors. That’s easy. Another way to handle this is to use the central locking feature built into the MES 5-Wire Door Lock Actuator. Our good friends at Electric-Life sell these. You can see them at this link.

These lock actuators do two things. First, they lock and unlock the doors. That’s pretty basic. They also have switches built into them to control central locking. When you pull up on the door lock knob, it pulls on the lock actuator mechanism and closes a switch internally. This switch sends a signal to the Infinitybox MASTERCELL to pulse the lock output on inMOTION to unlock the rest of the doors. Pushing down on this same door lock knob closes another switch inside the actuator that closes a second switch. This second switch is connected to another MASTERCELL input that sends a signal to inMOTION to lock the doors. Take a look at this wiring diagram.

Image of Infinitybox wiring diagram showing how to wire 5-wire lock actuators

There are a few things to consider when using these lock actuators.

Check the wiring diagrams that come with the actuators to confirm the wire colors in our drawing.
Depending on how you have the actuators oriented in the car, you may have to change the wiring for the inMOTION outputs and the central locking switches. You want the up and down directions to be the same on all actuators and you want the lock switches all in the same direction. Check to make sure everything is working correctly before you finalize you wiring connections.
You must properly adjust the linkage for the lock mechanism so that you can get full range on the actuator plungers when you pull up and push down on the lock knob.
Make sure that you train the inMOTION cell correctly. Follow the instructions that came with your inMOTION kit.

You can download a PDF of this wiring diagram by clicking this link.

Click here to contact our technical support team with any questions about wiring central locking with our Infinitybox system.

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