Multi Channel Relay Board for Netduino

Hello, all Im brand new to this and I have my very first controller on the way. A little breif back ground, so you know what your dealing with. LOL I work in the automation industry; however, Im more on the mechanical side of the bis Ive biult machines of much divercity from the ground up for about ten years and am now a field service engineer. I know a little bit about how this side of things work but I have many, many holes in my knowlege and will be in need of ALOT of help here. What my project intails so far is I will need to controll about 8 air actuated valves. These will have the DIN connecter plugs. I would like to set this up with an 8 channel or better relay board to switch the valves. So what would be the most cost effective and simplest way of doing so? I will need to input to the Netduino as well with a few different devices. Prox switches, a thermo couple, some manual buttons. E stop for instance. Id like things to be expandable incase I might need to add some stuff later on. Im in the very beginning of the design faze and this is one of the most important parts. So here I am Thanks in advance Gears Oh, just incase your wondering, my progect intails a small scale fully automatic biomass gasifier for residential. Just looking for a way to make this tech more practical.

Hi Gears,
you might want to have a look at the 16 Channel relay board from GHI.

You need to connect through I2C though, you may search the forum for this to get into the techno stuff about it. Just needs a few wires and is expandible up to 8 boards. Works fine on my device, but that's a FEZ Panda-II or Cobra device.

Cheers...

P.

Hi. I have one of these http://www.sigma-sho...lay-boards.html . I use mine from USB, so I don't know about using it with Netduino. Regards Morten

What my project intails so far is I will need to controll about 8 air actuated valves. These will have the DIN connecter plugs. I would like to set this up with an 8 channel or better relay board to switch the valves. So what would be the most cost effective and simplest way of doing so?

I will need to input to the Netduino as well with a few different devices. Prox switches, a thermo couple, some manual buttons. E stop for instance. Id like things to be expandable incase I might need to add some stuff later on. Im in the very beginning of the design faze and this is one of the most important parts. So here I am

I would design my own shield (daughter board). Its not terribly complicated, if your interested I can share mine with you. The one I've built has two relays, and 1 or 2 inputs, and a couple of transistor driven output. You could easily take what I have and scale it to your needs.

The one caveat with my design though is its one pin per output/input. You can easily change that though if you need my by using some '595 chips for output. A '595, and its equiv on the input side allow you to control a virtually unlimited number of inputs/outputs from just three pins by using SPI. Or, you can wait until Secret Labs produces a "Mega" version of the Netduino (hint, hint) which has many more digital I/O's

-dan

Well I have no experience with electronics other than plug and play devices and half the time I dont know what they even do. So making a board I think would be out of my leage. Not only that when ever I prototype something of the shelf parts are ususally the best way to go. Others wise I will have to manufacter custom stuff and It can get expensive to do. I like the 16 channel board; however, I didnt find one available through IGH. I did find one here though. http://www.robokits.co.nz/ZX-Relay16 Thank you all for your help. I have much to learn