Here is a picture of the setup with 8 switches connected. The board on the left has the optocouplers and Schmitt triggers. The input wires are connected to the green screw terminals on the left of this board. The next board has the parallel in shift registers. There is room to add more registers to this board, and it also has header pins that can connect to another board. The red board is just to distribute my 5v power input to the Arduino and the other boards. The board above the relays has the parallel out shift registers. This board can also be chained with another board.
After I connected everything I realized that I could use 8 fewer relays by using both the NC and NO posts for the led indicator lights.
I have made a few small changes to my Arduino sketch, and I will post another update once I get it cleaned up.
