At the end of my tether

[tennyson]

Hi Guys and Gals,
Looking for some help.

I am wiring up the lighting in my overheads.

I have a flyengravity panel fitted with simworld gauges and I bought the additional dimmer panel.
So, lighting for my forward overhead is 12 volt Led strips.

My rear overhead is (don't know) panel fitted with FDS IBL lighting, which is 5 volt.

I hooked up the gauges via their original pot and they work and dim fine. When it came to hooking up the other two, I had troubles, so I replaced the original pot with a ganged pot.
Now, I can run the necessary 12 volts for my led strips (working) and the gauges (working).
I then figured, I could just tap off the "pot out" on the dimmer panel and run it to my FDS IBL panel (this is one that connects all your IBL panels together and distributes the power). It has a 5 volt in and negative in.
Problem was the outlet is only 3.3volt, so it wouldn't work.

I racked my brain for days on ways to get around this. I thought I could fix it by buying a triple gang pot, but was told, no such thing (by the guys at Jaycar).

So, I figured the pot for the circuit breakers would do, and I'll just put a sticker on the overhead saying "rear overhead". Problem solvered!
Well, you'd think so, but this is where all my problems started.
I bought a new pot to go in there and hooked it up just like the other one, but no go.
I've tried a thousand combinations, and now I'm so frustrated, I think I need to pack the whole sim up and take it back, cause I'm too dumb to own it.

Has anybody got any advice on how to wire up a simple circuit to run a pot to the FDS IBL panel?

Man, I am sure I had more hair at the start of this week......


Thanx in advance,


Frank

[727737Nut]

Give us a rough schematic drawing of how you are hooking it all up. 

I also revert back to 2 previous posts about high side and low side dimming, here is the classic example of different parts causing issues by how they are wired up and trying to use a dimmer.

Rob

[RayS]

I briefly thought about doing something similar, with the intent of minimizing the # of wires I'd have to run up to the overhead. I figured that each dimmer pot would have a high side, a low side, and a center tap, so why not just combine all the high sides together, along with the low sides, making them all common on each side, then just run the wire for each pot wiper.

Then I realized the long arm of Ohm's law would step in and totally mess up my pots/dimmers because essentially I'd be wiring them all in parallel. Wiring 6 1k pots in parallel would give me an effective  resistance of 166 ohms across all 6 dimmers. That would never work.

I would be curious as well to see a rough schematic of your implementation.