Hey all, Checking back in as somebody emailed me to ask for the diagram.

@donP, yes, it looks like the value changed when the nice diagram was made. It's due to my crappy handwriting: That's supposed to be 1.0 , not 100 uF.

Were you able to get it to work with the original values?

Just curious.

 

Hi Toehead, I much appreciate what you did here.
Alas, my skills have so far fallen short.
I have more parts, simply haven't seriously tried again. Winter and long evenings are upon us though so I should try again.
I see you are 5th wheeling, not sure how often you are able to check in but please do keep an eye on this. I'm totally out of my depth here but would like to make a working version. I tried a breadboarded version of your sketch and got no joy. I left it oem, which as far as I can tell seems to be a flakey sensor. At a minimum I'd like to have a standard signal to switch it to when it comes undone on a big hill.

Let me check and order the cap and resistor values and whatever else needs restocking and try breadboarding another and plugging it in.

I have another Ranger, non flex. Whenever this one becomes reliable I'd like to start experimenting with charcoal powering the second one. That might take some sensor mods .