One of the many projects featured in the double-sized July & August edition of Elektor Magazine, the IO Warrior Expansion Board outlines how to create a multifunctional board sporting a vast number of inputs and outputs, making it ideal for a variety of industrial control applications via the PC.

This small universal interface card uses the IO-Warrior56 Module from Code Mercenaries and can be added to an old PC, notebook or laptop in order to convert it into a measurement and control hub making good use of any redundant hardware you have in storage. This versatile chip will allow you to automate your home, greenhouse, microbrewery or whatever other quasi-industrial process you have always wanted to put into operation.

Available ready-assembled from the Elektor Store, the IO-Warrior56 Module provides an easy, full-speed USB interface and a built-in temperature sensor. It is uncomplicated to talk to using a Visual Basic or C/C++ program—no fears of complex programming! Source code is available that works with the free version of Visual Studio.

The Elektor-designed IO-Warrior Expansion Board is spaciously laid out with through-hole components only for easy reproduction at home or in the lab.

Detailed instructions on how to program the IO-Warrior board’s peripherals in Visual Basic are found in the magazine article dedicated to the IO Warrior project.

Click here to order the ready-built mdoule