So, I've made a product that works, and after some thinking, I think it can be made cheaper with a microcontroller.
So, I've made this truth table for what I want the microcontroller to do. Does it make sense? From the truth table below, I would need a microcontroller that has 25 inputs, with 42 outputs (some can be used by multiple switches, i.e. rear panel LED's (only 1 red and 1 green LED). That's 67 total input/outputs. This would operate up to 8 individual switches. Later, I'd like to design it for only operation of 3 and 5 switches only.
I have a product that consists of 9 hall effect sensors, when triggered by a magnet, they activate LED's and/or a OptoMOS to switch on/off a device.
Now, from my understanding, most microcontrollers can not sink or source enough amps to power multiple LED's, so I would need to get logic level mosFETs to switch the led's on and off?.
Is this doable with a microcontroller? Do they make them so that they can sink/source mA to light LED's, without having the need for transistors or logic level mosfets to light them up? Would, perhaps, using logic gates to drive the LED's instead of the transistors/mosfets be better (what I have now, but no microcontroller).
I figured this would be a good project to get started in the world of microcontrollers. It's pretty simple (i think) since there really isn't any LCD's to control, clocks, frequencies, etc. Although, a backlit LED would be pretty cool instead of LED's, if it's possible. Depends on how complex it is to set one up.
Any help would be great. I thought about getting and learning on an arduino, but there's so much information out there for the arduino, i'm lost.
Anyone have any simple microcontroller projects? Some with links to programs used for the programming and stuff?
FYI, I'm open to also paying an engineer to help me with this set-up, but I also WANT to learn how to work with microcontrollers as well. I have other projects I'd like to do, like make a sequential LED controller for my car and my nephews car later in the future.