I'v been requested to quote a 3000 light controller for building model, the building model consists of 50 floors with each floor consisting of 60 rooms, each room has 1 lamp 12vdc @ 18mA current.
The requirements are that I can control each lamp individually using a PC.
Doing a rough calculation total current required is 540A so I decided to make maximum current 50A and only switch certain number of lamps at one time for a total of 50A or maybe 30A.
My plan as follows:
1.design a controller card for each floor with a microcontroller, 64 bit latches and RS422 interface making a total of 50 cards.
2. Design RS422 card for the PC and make my own protocol with headers including address field for floors and data fields for rooms. all cards receive same command but only correct floor address takes action.
3. computer keeps track of on lights for the current budget.
Any comments about the above configuration are welcome, any suggestions to reduce cost or work to be done will be extremely appreciated.
Any suggestions for small power supplies with high current capabilities are also needed.
Thank you friends.
Mahmood