While the Citroën logo they project onto the pavement looks great, [OrangeTungsten] wasn’t thrilled with how their door-mounted projectors actually functioned. The mechanism for detecting when they should kick on was a bit too clever for its own good, and needed to be simplified a bit. Luckily for us, the process was meticulously documented for anyone else who might find themselves in a similar situation.
Originally, the projector detected when it should turn on by sensing the presence of a tiny magnet using a Hall effect sensor. There are certainly some advantages to this approach, but in practice, [OrangeTungsten] says the retrofitted magnet would keep falling off and leaving the projector inoperative. The fix was simple enough: figure out how the circuit worked, pull out the Hall effect sensor, and replace it with a simple button that would physically make contact with the door frame.
It’s not a terribly complex fix, but it’s a clever solution and well documented, and that goes pretty far around these parts. We were also interested in this one because an examination of the electronics inside the projector uncovered a 8-pin microcontroller — the sole purpose of which would appear to be polling the Hall effect sensor and using its status to throw a transistor which in turn powers the LED.
It’s hard to believe that whoever designed this gadget couldn’t figure out how to turn an LED on and off without a MCU, but we’re living in strange times. We assume there’s some kind of justification for this, such as some flashing or fading effects, but [OrangeTungsten] never mentions the things doing anything more complex than simply turning on and off.
Whatever the rationale was behind the original design of these projectors, the important thing is that the application of some hardware from the parts bin got them up and working again, which is something we never get tired of seeing.
