Homevision Relay boards ... Interested?

["Phil Harris" <phillip.harris1@xxxxxxx>]

Hiya Guys,

Ian B and myself have been sitting here this afternoon trying to design a
relay board to control my electric curtains ... we thought that instead of
a
purpose built board to do exatcly what I need it might be useful to have a
general purpose relay board.

Throwing around ideas we have come up with the following "rough
description"
and are wondering whether there would be much interest from the group for
this as either a PCB or a built unit.

The board will take up a complete output port on HV. Four of the port lines
will be "relay select" lines, a fifth would be a
"status" line (On/Off) and
a sixth would be used as a "set" line to get the relay board to
read the
output port and perform the requested setting.

For example to turn on relay 4 you'd set the bottom four lines on the port
to OFF,ON,OFF,OFF (Binary Coded Decimal for 4), the "status" line
to ON and
then the "set" line to ON to action the command.

This would give you sixteen individually addressable relay outputs that
would retain their state until changed again or until the power went off.

It was discussed that the remaining two output lines could be used as
"board
select" lines which would enable up to 64 individually addressable
relays to
be controlled from a single HomeVision output port with the boards planned
as being stackable or daisychainable units.

Now, we haven't looked too deeply into this so we have no idea what kind of
costs would be involved or even at the moment what the programming for the
output ports would be like but we were wondering what kind of interest
there
would be from the group for such a board if we were to get it working.

Anyone interested if we decide to progress this further?

Phil