christhetrainguy09 posted:Sounds like you been a busy guy!
- Have you got a schematic drawn up?
- are you going to have it all on one PCB? or is it plug and play boards that plug into the pro-mini boards?
More busy with work than this, but yes, I put some time into it. I don't have a schematic right now, but will have one at some point. Likely after I order some parts and prove everything plays together the way it is supposed to. In any case the circuit is pretty straight forward. Power supply, optocouplers, pots, relays, switches, etc. All simple stuff from an electronics point of view. All the heavy lifting is done by the uP. The basic set-up will be similar to the schematic I posted in This thread.
The plan is to have one board with screw terminals for all the connections. The Arduino would mount in a header socket so that it could be removed and replaced with an updated one if needed. I haven't gotten any feed back yet one way or the other about the question I asked on boot-up time, but I think I'm going to error on the side of making a better design over making it easy for people to update at home. Because of this the on-board USB is not needed as it can't be used anyway to program an ATMega without a boot loader.
I've found a supply of the same relays used on the cheap modules at a fair price, so I'm going to give a try ay including them on board. As mentioned earlier, the expensive thing is space on the PCB, not the actual parts going on it. There isn't any point in going SMT however since most of the space-taking parts are through-hole anyway. Anyway, I'll fumble around with the PCB layout once I have the parts, and after everything is tested out.
JGL
