How to connect powerswitch tail to BrewPi Spark

That looks fine. Value is 100, output pin should be ON continuously.

Is the LED inside the controller (behind the green connectors) ON?

OK I rebooted, re-configured devices. I think I am running normally based on what Elco described in another message to me. Everything seems normal to me except the heating is pulsed on and off within about 1 second, then a 3 second delay occurs, and then this is repeated over and over during the heating cycle.

I guess this is to be expected with the default heating cycle of 4 seconds? Seems like the heater is being switched on and off so much would be a bad idea.

This was happening to me as well. Because it would turn on for one second, then off for 4 seconds, it would cause my heater to emergency shut off and not turn on even when switched on. This would require me to unplug the heater for 5-10 minutes to reset it. Setting it to PWM of 60 fixed this for me.

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This is intentional: using a period of 4 seconds gives fine grained control over a pure resistive heater. If your heater has some form of ā€˜intelligenceā€™, or an internal fan, it will be better to increase the cycle to 60 seconds. That way, it will be 10 seconds on, 50 seconds of, for example.

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I appreciate this thread since this is relevant to my heating setup - I am using a powerswitch tail since I was crunched for time and just wanted to get the system up faster. I plan to upgrade to an SSR eventually, but for the time being I needed something to get me going.

Iā€™ve just recently finished my initial setup the other night and Iā€™m going through the docs, but I wasnā€™t able to find anything on how to change the default 4 second cycle to something a little longer - say like 30 or 60. Is that in advanced settings?

In advanced settings, I believe it is heater PWM period. Mine is set at 60.