How would I go about hooking up and programming an Sainsmart 8 channel SSR board to switch at certain times? I have the RTC clock working, but no idea what to do next.
I'm a complete newb, so any help would be great.
This is what I have to use:
Arduino MEGA
SSR board: Relays | Sensors | Controllers | SainSmart – Tagged "Relays" – SainSmart.com
RTC: http://www.dfrobot.com/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=511#.UC-o9N1mQ3g
The RTC is running the code from here: DS1307 RTC tutorial
Make up a data array based on the time read, the time would serve as an index ("array pointer".)
If that was every 10 minutes you'd have 144 elements, that'd be a lot of bytes, but there are more economical approaches (bitRead).
Exactly what to do depends on exactly what you want (or expect.)
You need to decide what they need to do. Are they going to do the same thing every day? Do you want to control them with an on time and an off time or an on time and a duration. How accurate do your on and off times need to be?
At it's most basic you have an on time and off time and every time loop() runs get the current time and compare to the on and off times and take appropriate action.