Project move camera

I have been using plc's during school this year and I was wondering if I could do a little project in the following 2 months.

The goal is : mount a camera on a rotate-able platform to move the camera up/down left/right and zoom in/out and focus. This all should be done remorely.

The setup in my *cough* 'plan' would be to use a pc. This pc should be able to operate the condition of an array of relais as part of the steering regulation. These relais would then operate a motor. This motor will then move the platform on which the camera is mounted. The same would then be done to operate the zooming and focussing.

That was the easy part, put now I need a way to have my pc operate the relais.

Is there an efficient/cheap solution to this ?

I have basic knowledge of operating and programming a plc. I concluded that this would be a possible solution but maybe not the cheapest. I do wish to spend some money to make my project a succes, but I don't want to do an overkill on my bank-account when there would be a cheaper alternative.

So basically my question is : How can I operate multiple relais (in the order of 10) with a regular IBM pc with any standard serial/parallel/ps2/usb ports or ISA/PCI card.

Thank you in advance
Drop a line if you have any comments
and yes I do know that this is slightly off-topic, sorry about that, but I couldn't come up with a better solution for this problem than to just post this thread.

I know several will laugh at what I am about to say but its a good place to start.

First off vision systems (like what you are describing) are in abundance these days.
BUT
If you want to build your own system a good place to start is LEGO's
LEGO MINDSTORM AND VISION SYSTEM
I know sounds like kid stuff but this stuff is good and fun.

Anyway to really learn to interface a pc with external devices then a little study of robotics is needed. Another good place for that is:
http://www.southwest.com.au/~jfuller/robotic.html
That site shows an abundance of inexpensive devices you can use to connect the printer port to devices.

http://www.robotics.com/robots.html
An abundance of info on interfaces and vision equipment.

Welcome to CCD Direct
A good place to buy high end cameras, zoom lenses, framegrabbers etc

Thank you very much !

Especially the second link proves to be invaluable.

Here is a link to something similar I did while I was working at my college last summer.

http://xrobocam.ati.sl.on.ca/default.asp

I didnt do the actual programming of it, but what was used was a Visual Basic Control called NTPort ( http://www.uct.on.ca/ ) which gives VB control over the parallel port.

Mechanially it just uses two stepper motors, one driving a vetical shaft and one driving a horizontal shaft. The help file on my first link should give a pretty decent description

if you have any questions, let me know.

-Steve

Thank you for your contribution.

At the moment I think I will go with the parallel port.

I have been thinking some time and while using 6 bit combinations I can operate 27 different relais. This is done using 2 XOR and a AND connections.

Again thank you for giving me the kickstart, I hope I can have a working 'prototype' in 2 months.