As I said you've likely destroyed your circuit by not having the diodes present, you'll
have to check everything is working without the relays, then check the relays take 200mA
or less when powered direct from the supply, and always always have those diodes across
the terminals - you can destroy your power supply even.A relay coil stores a lot of magnetic energy when active, trying to switch it off without
providing an alternate route for the current (via the diode) can lead to 100's or 1000's of
volts spike, enough to trash most semiconductor devices immediately.
Thanks MarkT for your recommendation!
I disconnected pin 3 from the relay. It still goes from 7v to 0v (My 9v battery seems to be dying). So that is still working
I tested the pin 3 with each of the coils individually with a flyback diode. IT WASN'T WORKING.
I apologize for the confusion at the beginning of the forum post; my memory was jogged wrong. It worked on the Arduino for one relay, but I never tested 555 with one relay. The 555 could turn on the one relay but it could not turn it off.
SO I found another clue
- First of all, I've used low voltage relays a lot and have never run into a problem when not using flyback diodes. I guess I should start using them, however this time the issue was not with the backwards current
- In the Arduino sketch Blink, whenever you do
digitalWrite(13, LOW);you are actually connecting the pin to either Vcc or GND (with registers and all that stuff I do not understand).
If you use a continuity tester on pin 13 to ground, it will beep every time the LED turns off. The same applies vice versa, with Vcc and when the LED is on.
I then tried the continuity tester on the 555 timer, pin 3 and GND. It worked, but not vice versa, with Vcc. I do not think this really matters, as the relay has the ability to turn ON, just not OFF.
Even though that does not really matter to me, I wanted to say it just in case the forum made any use of this.
I should also mention that I have tried using pulldown and pullup resistors to the relay / pin 3. That did not help.
I don't think this will help but will it help if I mention that the chip that I am using is rather old? The HA17555 is what I'm using, and I'm assuming it's pretty much compatible with any other NE555 or NM555 or LMC555 or whatever555.
SO in conclusion from what MarkT recommended me to do, the 555 circuit is not damaged, but I realized that the 555 circuit does not even work with ONE relay. I can turn on ONE relay but I cannot turn it off.
I hope there are more problems with the circuit that people can find, because I feel like we are running out of solutions!