Trailer lighting outage detection circuit
AssigneeGrote Industries, Inc.
InventorsTimothy W. Brooks, Eric Thorstensen, Christopher Busse
Life of this patent
Estimating the term…
Abstract
A vehicle LED lighting outage detection circuit is disclosed for detecting a fault in the LED light and automatically increasing the power drawn from the light power supply in response to the fault. A complementary detection circuit is also disclosed for detecting the increased power draw and signaling a fault to an operator. The increased power draw can be selected to be in the form of a pulse that settles to a lower power draw state after a time to avoid excessive and wasteful power draw. The system can be mounted in a vehicle and, more particularly, to a semi-tractor truck.
Claims19
An outage detection circuit, comprising:
- a current monitor electrically connected in parallel with a lamp, wherein the current monitor is operable to determine current supplied to the lamp;
- a sense resistor electrically connected between two monitor terminals of the current monitor;
- and
- a comparator, wherein an output terminal of the current monitor is electrically connected to a first input terminal of the comparator, and wherein a second input terminal of the comparator is electrically connected to a reference voltage;
- a load element separate from the lamp and electrically connected in parallel with the current monitor and the comparator, wherein the load element, the current monitor, and the comparator are electrically connected in parallel between a power supply and a ground reference;
- a switching electrically connected to the comparator and the load element, wherein the switching device is operable to adjust current through the load element according to input from the comparator, and wherein the comparator is operable to control the one or more switching devices to change a current flow through the load element when the current monitor detects a change in current flow through the lamp.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.