I apologize if this is too basic a question, but I would like some input before I start shelling out on components.
I'm trying to figure if this is the right way to attack a problem I've been mulling for a couple of weeks. I'd like to clean up the left handlebar controls on a motorbike by replacing the large bundle of wires heading down the handlebar with two thin conductors. On classic bikes, the lighting and horn controls consist of a 12-V wire going out, a switch, and a 12-V wire headed back. This covers left and right signals, the horn, and the high/low headlight switches. On older bikes, this becomes a fat bundle of wires that becomes increasingly brittle and fussy with age. Because these switches represent logic states, it stands to reason that the switch positions can be more efficiently relayed as a digital signal over a single wire to an onboard Arduino that controls lighting relays (or more sophisticated logic). This would eliminate a big bundle of wires and might open up new avenues for clean custom work.
It seems straightforward to configure a Trinket or Miniduino to aggregate the switch states and output a digital signal that signifies those switch states. Would an Arduino be able to accept and parse such a data stream? I have a passing acquaintance with serial protocols, and one of the key aspects is timing, so that the receiving computer knows where to start and finish interpreting chunks of data. Is this a roundabout way of saying it would be better to handle such communications over USB? If I go USB, do I need to recapitulate the host/client architecture inherent to the specification, or can "dueling Arduinos" negotiate such complexities on their own?
This probably is a reflection of my n00b status, but it seems that most of the Arduino applications I have seen place the switches quite close to the board, or at least wired directly to it. It's harder to find instances where the inputs are gathered, digitized, then sent to another Arduino for action. I am open to hearing about how the proposed approach is all wrong. I think it would be great to find a unit even simpler than a Trinket or Mini/nano that simply gathers switch states and sends them intelligibly down a wire to an Arduino.
Thanks for any and all help.
--William