Dual Switch wiring help ch4x4

Alright - gave up on all the journey to get #CH4x4 to return a call or email. Ridiculously poor customer support - especially to the non-pro, which they have basically written off. Found a similar switch on Amazon/Stark Industries and it worked out of the gate - well mostly! I wired the new dual switch like this...

• Black - relay black/Negative (Ground for Red LED on switch)
• Blue / Green - relay blue of each LB/Positive Out (When switch is on, sends signal/power to Relay to switch on)
• Red - relay white/Positive In (Power)
• Yellow - Unconnected

In this scenario, both LBs are working as expected; however, the switch does not light up at all - not when LBs are on and not when headlights are on. I understand that they won't light when the headlights are on since I didn't connect the yellow (Looking for guidance in the Sequoia/Tundra world on which wire I can tap into on similar, factory switches or I guess I can go to the fuse box and tap into 'Panel'). Based on our discussions, I thought the way I wired it would at least light the switches when on. What am I missing? If breaking the connection between the red/yellow wire on the board is what is needed to get dimming to work then I'm not into that right now (afraid I might ruin something).

FYI - I took apart the CH4x4 switch and everything looked ok - meaning, it looked like the pic of a previous post. Outside of that I was basically just staring at it looking for something obvious.

 

Pics would help, testing continuity between red/yellow wires would tell you if the new switch circuit board has that same configuration. It’s possible the switches are dpdt on/on with red/yellow completely separate so one side of each switch controls which led lights and gets power from yellow and the other side supplies power from red to the output wire in one position and not the other. Hard to tell with no pics and no test data but that would explain your results.
With the ch4x4 switch pair removed from the housing you could plug it into the harness to see if the problem is in the switch on the board or in how the board fits the housing. That’s where an issue with fitment could cause the button you press not to activate the switch on the board.

 

Hey All
Just saw this thread. I wish I had seen it before my purchase. Bought 3 switches with the amber/white combo. All have this issue. I checked the red and yellow continuity with my multimeter and they are short. So no surprise, these are faulty switches. I emailed them and if they don’t get back to me I’m going to dispute the charges on my CC.

 

Read the thread a bit more carefully. It’s not a fault, it’s designed to allow the red wire alone to feed both power and illumination since most people don’t bother with the dash circuit but still demand illumination. They can make it one way or the other but not both. You’ll spend less time making the alteration yourself than waiting for a replacement that will be identical. Just cut the trace between the red wire and yellow wire pins. See pic in post #17.

 

Thank you. I’ll see if I can take the thing apart. I think it’s still faulty because for people that want to use the power source for backlit they can just crimp the yellow and red together. At least this issue should be mentioned in the documents because in my case current was flowing from BAT to my dash backlight and keeping the tail and cornering lights on all the time.

 

I agree the fault is in the documentation and they should have kept them separate and crimp to avoid the dash circuit but that’s not what was done. Explaining why people do things is beyond me, I just try to solve the problem and make it do what I want. Up to me all the leds would have the correct resistor to match dash level illumination but that is never the case either.

 

A couple small screw drivers and patience to open them up. There are tabs on the sides and the plug surround has one that engages the board. You can see in post 17 the hole in the board for that pin.

 

100% agree. Just to confirm, will cutting the trace that connects the yellow to red remove the short and keep the switch LED functional? I wish the picture had the other side of the board too!

 

Yes. Cutting the trace forces you to use both the red wire to supply switch power and the yellow wire to supply illumination power to the unswitched leds. The switches are dpdt with one side of each switch connected to the output(blue or green) and the other side controlling which of its two leds gets power. A combination of on-off and on-on in each switch. Once you have it opened up post pics of both sides to show others. The traces on each side are connected by vias which are tiny holes in the board that are plated with copper.

 

Awesome thank you. I’ll give it a try. Helpfully it’s easy to take the pcb out.

 

Once you’ve done it once it’s not bad but you have to be careful since it has a few tabs in different places. The buttons on the switch itself (blue pieces) capture the laser etched buttons you press so you have to slide the boards up out of grooves in the laser etched pieces.

 

So I finally managed to take the switch apart. Cut the trace as discussed (I hope this is the trace you meant). So after cutting the short between yellow and red is gone but the backlit leds still take their power from red not yellow. So effectively I have disconnected yellow on the pcb. But the switch is still not performing as expected what I want to achieve is the following:
1. Power to switch: red
2. Power to switch backlit leds: yellow
3. No short/connectivity between red and yellow.

is this possible?

edit: I added a picture from the other side too. Based on what I see and tracing the routes achieving what stated above is impossible without running some jumper wires etc. the yellow pin is not connected to any of the led terminals. It’s simply connected to the red trace. So to power the leds with yellow you’d have to 1/disconnect them from the red and 2/wire them to yellow. This is basically rewiring the pcb. Reading the previous posts I thought this is possible with cutting traces on the pcb but I may have misunderstood.

edit 2: I disconnected the trace between the switch poles. And the switch is not DPDT. So the information in this thread is wrong. The switch is a SPDT On-Off-On switch. I.e the power and the outputs on the 2 switch poles are connected inside the switch.

 

Just to point this out a solder blob is all that’s necessary to return the board to the previous condition. That’s a perfect cut in the trace by the way.

It may still be possible but we need to figure out if it’s really single pole or if they just have both poles connected with a trace on each switch. If you look at the two middle pins on each switch the outer one is connected to red and the inner with a trace. With the connector “up” the inner above switch pin is connected to the output and the outer pin with a trace. The bottom switch pins are connected to a trace leading to a via(hole) that presumably feeds the led for each switch in the off position.
The question we need to answer is whether you can feed power to the two middle switch pins independently so that red can continue to power the switch and yellow be able to power the “off” led. The “on” led always gets power from the output in these switches regardless of where the input comes from. It’s only lit with the switch on whereas the backlight led is on whenever the switch has power(in the current configuration) and it’s this led we want to segregate. Keeping red/yellow separate also means cutting the traces between each of the pin pairs on each switch. Which sucks because the outputs are on inner pins (we want to feed with red) and the off leds are on outer pins as are the red wire inputs (which we’d want to feed with yellow). All this is presumed from what can be seen on the right hand switch and traces. The left hand switch has the switch off led power trace on the top of the board with only the ground trace visible and connected to the current limit resistors. Also on top is the connection to each “on” led and the pic doesn’t show either of those sets of traces.
It might be as simple as cutting the traces connecting each pin pair, adding a jumper from the yellow pin to each inner middle pin, and redesignating yellow as 12v supply and red as illumination supply but without a better image and a bit more on the guts of the switch I can’t say for sure. My appologies for the garden path detour. If you want, I’ll buy the now unreturnable switch and do the deep dive or you can keep it and return it to its previous shortcomings with a solder blob on the cut trace. LMK.

 

As mentioned in edit 2 I’m certain it’s a SPDT switch so the switch pins are connected inside the switches. It is impossible to separate led power from switch power unless you remove the SPDT out of the circuit and keep the amber light on regardless of switch position. I decided that’s too much work to got an already over priced switch to do what it’s supposed to do.
Will try to pursue my PayPal refund but was nice to give it a try! Thanks again for all the help and happy 2023.

 

Sorry, I missed that. In that case a replacement could be swapped in that is dpdt. These are available from mouser. https://www.mouser.com/datasheet/2/240/pn-3051023.pdf
Granted it’s a stupid amount of work to get what you want but it should at least be possible. It’s anyone’s guess whether the board will get reworked with the proper switch utilized eventually but it may just be a matter of time or them waiting for someone else to do it and copy them instead. Maybe enough complaints will push the process.

 

Thanks for the part. Yeah I think it’s cheaper and easier to do a new pcb manufactured and assembled in China! I used to design/manufacture embedded devices a few years back. Everything is more expensive now but you could still probably make a 100 of these for a couple 100 bucks and retrofit to the ch4x4 shells. For now I’ll go back to single switches that have the correct wiring because i don’t want to undo all the wiring harness that I have put together. It’s a shame since the double switch design is so neat:/

 

Yeah, great idea and it partly works but not as advertised. A few years ago they didn’t have these at all so maybe they’ll get it right in time.

 

Reviving an old thread as I just discovered this issue with the dual CH4x4 switches. I found this thread while doing some Googling on the issue. This switch gets constant power as I want to turn something on even with the engine off.

So I severed the trace from the yellow pin at the red line. I figured if I severed it anywhere else it would sever the power to the switches.



However, when installing the switch again the orange (off) still lights up.

So, I said, "screw it" and put the Ground/Blk wire to a relay that is activated by the ACC/engine on (had one already nearby) and so the orange (off) will illuminate only when the ACC/engine is on.

Weird thing though, the white (on) still works when the switch is activated and the ground is disconnected (ACC/engine off). This means the white (on) is inline to the switch circuit bc no way is it getting ground from the black wire.

So I don't get the purpose of the orange (off) to be on the red circuit. What is the point of the yellow wire? It adds nothing to their design...? Well I suppose their idea was that the switch only has power when the ACC/engine is on. And the yellow also adds power to the circuit when the headlights/dashlights are on even with the engine off? This is dumb. Why couldnt they be consistent with their single switch design? I have no problems with their single switches with it being wired to always hot.

I could open it up more and see where the red trace goes to the orange LED but it works now so I don't want to mess with it.

 

To completely understand the different circuits and how they interconnect on these boards you have to look at both sides and also determine what each switch position connects or disconnects. These aren’t made the way I would make them nor are they simply doubled up versions of the single switch varieties. I haven’t pursued it since my last post but I believe it would require replacing the switches with dpdt versions along with severing traces and adding jumpers to do the job. At that point a whole new board from Oshpark would be better. Whoever designed these just did a poor job. The red wire trace and yellow wire trace shouldn’t be connected but are. The off led should receive power through the switches when in the off position and the on led should get power through the switches in the on position and those two supplies should be completed separate. They aren’t. It’s wrong switches on a wrong board.

 

I'm having same issue with CH4x4 double switch. My previous single switch worked fine, with blue illumination when off and car is on and brighter illumination when activated. The new double switch is replacing the current light switch and adding another light switch. Since I wired my corresponding lights to full-time battery power, I'm stuck with lighted switches even when car is turned off. In short, it doesn't look like the double switches have the same illumination functionality as "two" single switches. Guess I'll have to switch my lights to accessory power, so switches are only lit when car is running.

Not sure what other options there are, other than what was mentioned above. I thought the double switches would work just like two single switches, but apparently not. Why would CH4x4 give the options for "blue off/green on" if it isn't capable??