Hello
I need to develop a custom board (hardware + software) to drive a set pneumatic valves. The requirements are
- the boards can be stacked (up to 18 boards can be stacked, but I expect this number to be increased in the future)
- the boards must be configuration-free (no dip-switches to set the board address)
- the bus must be fault-tolerant: if a board in the stack breaks, the other boards should continue to work properly
- pneumatic valves are "digital", so the bus must convey only on/off commands
An external board communicates with the stacked boards through the bus and drives each pneumatic valve indivudually
The only solution I can think of is to have two serial buses: the first one is an in-out bus used only to configure the address of each board in the stack and is used only when the system is switched on. The second bus connects all the boards in parallel, thus providing the required fault-tolerance
However, this solution is far from being elegant... Does somebody have a better idea?
Cheers
Ambrogio
