I'm curious if anyone can whip up a quick program to control 4 electronic relays via either an RS-232 serial port or a parallel port. I know, you are likely wondering who in the heck uses COM or LTP ports anymore, right? The quick answer is, I would like to!
The idea is for me to build and be able to control an outdoors camera mount, so it may tilt up, tilt down, pan left and pan right. I would love for the control to be done via web interface accessible from anywhere on the 'net, however I would be plenty happy with four clickable buttons in a window.
My thoughts are that one button in the program would control one relay each. Each relay could be controlled just by toggling one pin in the serial or parallel port high in relation to ground when a button is clicked on, maintain the pin toggled high while the button remains clicked, and then return that pin to 0v when the button is no longer being clicked, that would work.
Electronically, I'd like to keep this project as simple as possible. By toggling one pin high, I was thinking I could use a power supply and a few transistors between the serial port pins and the relays, to provide and control the voltage used to drive the relays.
My idea is to implement a camera for my community watch along a tree line with a foot path carrying suspect foot traffic. Pan and tilt would be awesome to include but aren't exactly necessary, so if this can't be done quickly and easily, no worries.
Since we're a not-for-profit group we cannot really afford nifty wireless IP cameras nor any other equipment I would love to see deployed, however I do have a spare sony 1/3 inch CCD camera on hand, along with electronic and mechanical components to whip up both the control and pan/tilt unit. I will be donating the home brew electronics hardware to the community watch. If you could dontate the software to toggle some serial port pins high and low, and maybe integrate a web based interface, we would all be thankful.
