Cutting the relay shield

Is it safe to cut one relay off of the relay shield? I’m only using one relay and have a 6" box with other components inside to work with. I didn’t see any solder runs going to the end of the board, aside from the controls for that relay, but I want to make sure before cutting.

Are you going to simply desolder the relay or physically cut the relay shield?

I think @Mjones wants to physically cut off the last relay from the shield in order for it to fit in his box. I think it would be safe…

1 Like

That’s not safe, at all. During the process of cutting the PCB, depending on the tool used, there can be cases of internal layers getting shorted. At worst, the positive and negative routes will be connected, resulting in fire risk.

@peekay123, your inputs please!

3 Likes

A legitimate concern but while I do no have a relay shield, I find it highly unlikely that it has any more than 2 layers so the risk is pretty low if one is sure no traces are there for anything else. Seems like a mean thing to do to a prototyping board tho.

1 Like

I don’t think the board is any more than 2 layers, it is pretty mean, we are having a board made that will fix this problem, but it’s still in the prototype phase.

We don’t recommend cutting the shield and then using it to operate high voltage power lines. If you need a smaller relay shield for the Photon, check out NCD’s line of relay shield products for the Particle ecosystem. Here is an example of a 2-relay shield:

If you need to, our hardware designs for the Relay Shield are open sourced, here:
https://github.com/spark/photon-shields/tree/master/relay-shield

4 Likes