Greetings to all and thank you for a most interesting post and conversation, I have been building some panels and getting up to speed with DCS-bios but now the time has come to go the "full monty" as they say and move from Mega's to RS485 Bus, maybe.......
I have some questions around the setup.
1. It was mentioned that you couldn't use a Mega as a Slave, this would seem to be an ideal solution due to the large number of output pins, is this still correct as of 2021?
1a. Can anyone explain as to why this is the case, as I have seen Uno's used as masters and slave in other IOT projects? is it specifically a 2560 mega issue?
2. In early post there is a picture from Han via Blue73 (I think) around his left, right and front panels and all the nano's (4) used for Front, by my reckoning there aren't enough outputs available to run all the DDI/MPCD buttons and the combined switches etc, are you using mega's or something else for them?
3. Even using Nano's It seems to me that its going to be quite complicated and you are going to have the larger panels run by multiple nano's, I assume people find this ok?
4. Are there any other considerations around the USB use of Mega's as this always seemed to make more practicality to me as a mega still has approximately the same number of pins as 4 nano's? The only downside appears to be the USB requirements.
5. Slightly off topic, has anyone considered using the i-pac4 boards as an alternative, mind you they are a premium board along with associated costs.? but they appear to overcome
issues with USB bus. https://www.ultimarc.com/control-interfaces/i-pacs/i-pac4-board/
Regards to all and thanks for any replies.