Hello,
This is my first post, I am new to the Arduino world and learning so please kind.
With that said, what I am wanting to do is to create a light show display using an Arduino, not sure which one yet, and have music dance with the lights.
I have read many DIY's on making cards etc for this, but I have a relay board, very nice one. It is a CIO-ERB24, and the card to control that board if needed, a PCI-DIO24.
I would like to be able to use these and not create or buy any other type of boards, besides an Arduino to make it all work together. The relay board can be powered via 5v molex, so that I think is important.
What I am asking is there anyone out in this forum that can guide me and assist me by telling me if these boards will be able to work with any Arduino to control lighting and have them dance with music? Like Christmas music displays.
I do have all the manuals for the board and card, and can upload them, but did not want to do that until someone was available to assist me.
That is a PCI card that goes into a desktop computer, to give you 24 GPIO pins. This would be key if you were controlling the relay board from a computer, but it is not applicable when controlling it from an Arduino. If you are controlling it from a computer, then it sounds like there'd be no arduino involved...
An Arduino Uno wouldn't have enough pins, but an Arduino Mega would, or you could use a trio of shift registers to control all 24 lines from... what, 5 IO pins? (Data, Clock, MR, Latch, and OE), allowing it to be controlled with any arduino, or an unofficial attiny-based board.
One challenge you will have using those to make lights that react to music is that a relay can't turn on and off infinitely fast. 20ms to turn on, 10ms to turn off, according to the spec sheet you linked. Furthermore, you probably can't rapidly blink the LEDs either, without causing premature failure of the relays. Relays don't like to turn on and off constantly. This is one of the advantages of MOSFETs for switching LEDs, and why that's what most people do (you can also control brightness via PWM).
Finally - have you already bought those parts? I nearly fell out of my seat when I saw those prices - I hope you didn't pay full price. A quick search on ebay shows abundant options for getting relay boards for way less - assuming you determine that a relay board is what you want, not MOSFETs.