While digging in my parts bin to repair a bad capacitor on a tattoo machine, I found my 2 8-channel relay boards. I have never used them. Never even hooked them up. I had about a dozen high output Cree LEDs wired up and sitting, unused. Suddenly, I had an idea...
The output from the Arduino drives the LEDs in sequence, so I pulled signal lines from the breadboard and fed them into the relays. Separate power was supplied by a bench power unit from a tattoo kit someone sold me years ago. Garbage for tattooing, awesome for running almost anything on the bench.
While its certainly not much more than a seizure machine right now, as proof of concept, I now have 16 channels of controllable power switches that can run anything up to 110 volts with low-voltage signals from the Arduino.
Now the fun begins! As I continue to work on a home for me and the girl, I'm also working out the technical details for environmental controls in the sim.
Practical? Hell no. Fun? You betcha. And it's keeping a little bit of sanity intact.
Another video soon, as my Chinese parts are coming in. More build videos on the way!
