September 11, 2025  Latching buttons support

Latching buttons are now supported in both Switch Control and Circuit Control.

5.5m motor boat panel

Circuit Control and Switch Control are designed for digital control of loads. This means that loads connected to Circuit Control can be turned on or off from the buttons wired to it, from navigation displays, from mobile phones (via our Wi Fi Gateway), and from auxiliary control stations with physical buttons where Switch Control is installed.

In this scenario, latching buttons do not reflect the state of the load: a user can turn a load on with the button, then turn it off on the chartplotter, and the button will remain in the pressed position. The only element that reflects the load state is the indicator light in the button.

Nevertheless, there is a use case where latching buttons are preferable to momentary buttons. On the Lowrance HDS PRO display shown in the screenshot, using digital switching for loads is not very convenient and requires several taps to switch away from the chart or sonar page. Therefore, the user will prefer to use a physical button installed next to the display.

A reasonable question may arise: why install Circuit Control on this boat at all? The answer is simple: the boat's panel space is limited, and it was decided to use miniature but low power buttons. In this case, high power loads such as bilge pumps should be switched via relays. This is where Circuit Control has an advantage, because it uses latching (bistable) relays and does not consume energy to hold the contacts.

The second reason is the insufficient number of buttons that fit on the panel. Some auxiliary loads - for example, turning on the audio speaker lighting - do not have a physical button and are switched only from the Lowrance display.

Thus, in this installation latching buttons turned out to be genuinely more convenient, because in most cases they reflect the load state.

Moreover, they have another property that can be useful. When power is applied, Circuit Control restores the loads to the state they were in before power was removed. However, in latching button mode, the device switches loads according to the current positions of the buttons connected to it.

You can check the current mode and select a new one with the command:

       YD:BUTTONS [ MOMENTARY | LATCHING ]

On the boat described in this article, Circuit Control also controls power to the navigation instruments and to the NMEA 2000 network; for this it is connected to the NMEA 2000 network through a power isolator.

Firmware update for Circuit Control and Switch Control are available on the Downloads page.

 

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