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.
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.