The Development thread for the Clust-o-Matic can be found here.

What is it?

The Clust-o-Matic is a driver board that allows you to trigger up to four ignitors or ejection charges from a single altimiter or timer a much higher voltage/current than the triggering device can handle. 
How much higher? Try 14 amps...per channell!

As an added bonus, the Clust-o-Matic also ensures that each connected ignitor fires as close to each other as possible and that the failure of a single ignitor does not affect the rest.

But when would I use one?
Lets say that you wanted to launch a high power rocket with a central M-motor and airstart a cluster of four K-class composites after a three second delay. Having made good your escape from the sanitarium, and also completed building the airframe, its time to look at how you will airstart four composite motors.

There are many triggering devices that can be used to do this but, most can only handle a single composite grade ignitor. You need four!

There are two solutions.

First Solution: Wire up all four ignitors in parallel and connect them to the delay device.

This has three main problems:

1. The total current required by all four ignitors will probably be way too much for what the device can handle. You risk damaging the device in which case, none of the motors will ignite. There's a link to some research on this in the forum thread. A first-fire needs about 10A to get going...
2. Because of the manufacturing tolerances in the ignitors, where the amount of current required to initiate the ignitor varies (by as much as 10% assuming 5% components are used) the ignitors will initiate in a random serial pattern. Not all at once which is what is required.
3. If one of the ignitors is damaged (a short circuit), it can effectively drain all the current available and ensure none of the ignitors initiate.

Second Solution : The Clust-o-Matic

This handles the three scenarios above by:

1. The initiator device is used to simply signal the Clust-o-Matic to fire and only a tiny 3 volt 20mAh signal is required. Once received, this signal triggers the flow of up to 14 amps at 11.1 volts per channel (if using a 500mAh 30C burst 3 cell Li-Poly). Easily enough to handle even four copper-heads.
2. Each ignitor is handled as an independant channel by the Clust-o-matic. Each ignitor is simply provided with as much power as it needs to fire as quickly as possible (regardless of current differences between the different ignitors)
3. In the case of an ignitor short, each ignitor can draw as much current as it can, up to a point. Because the Clust-o-Matic is based on "Smart" FETS, if an ignitor is consuming too much power, the FET will clamp the current draw for that ignitor only. This ignitor may not fire, but there will be more than enough current available for the other three to fire.

The Clust-o-Matic can also be use for ground based cluster ignition or even as a simple relay to a launch controller to handle composite powered drag-races. Imagine a drag race of four M-Class rockets fired using an Electron-Beam launch controller. SImply extend the wire on the Electron-Beam by several hundred feet, attach a Clust-o-Matic, then wire up the four motors and you are good to go.

This one's a cinch to use:

Work out which output terminal on your altimeter or timer is positive and which is negative.
If your device has multiple outputs, then the positives for each output will be connected together.
 
Alternately, set a multimeter to continuity test and, with the no battery installed and the power switch turned on, look for the terminal that shows zero ohms to the positive terminal of the battery connection.

Connect the Battery and timer to the Clust-o-matic as shown:

Power everything up.
If your timer or altimeter complains about failed continuity then put the supplied 47 ohm, 3W resistor in parallel with the altimeter. This will make the Clust-o-matic look more like an e-match.

Do what you need to do to get the timer/alt to fire 
Check that the LED on the clust-o-matic comes on.
 If it doesn't then you probably have the polarity on the timer/alt wrong, swap the wires around and try again.

Once you get the LED coming on, then you're good to go!
Hook up the igniters to the long bank of terminals and give it a test...

PK