Re: Has anyone interfaced an external system example, sounding a buzzer and turning on a light.

On 2/11/2016 8:34 PM, Roberto José Etcheverry Romero wrote:

I'm of the school that this kind of interfaces should not be run directly
on the i but on their own self contained board (be it an arduino, pi, or
even an atom box with linux/windows if you so desire) and just connect to a
socket/webservice or other server app running in the i for reports.

Yes, yes, yes!!!

In
Mike's case, i would only let the i know the event duration and the station
but not burden it with running the counter and waiting for the off signal...

I completely agree with this. One particular advantage is that the
outboard controller can continue to handle the actual button presses,
actuations, and timings even when the IBM side is unavailable (say
during backups, upgrades, or temporary network configuration changes).

In any case, for production enviroments you should search for off the shelf
appliances that can give you peace of mind i've seen some cases where
homebrew electronics bring more problems than they solve (and other where
they work flawlessly).

Another agreement here! I myself would use a homebrew design because my
favourite programming language is solder :-) But that doesn't mean that
everyone should. My suggestion was mostly to get the ideas flowing.