Here is an update of my light control circuitry. I have an Arduino mini at the bottom right acting as my primary controller. I’m not using the arduino environment to program it though. I’m just using it because it’s a nice small atmega platform that has the crystal already on the board. I’m just coding in straight C and using avrdude to load the chip (which really isn’t all that different). I have it currently wired to three other amega48 microcontrollers which are programmed to act as slaves on an TWI serial line. I then have two of those wired up to MAX232 chips to stream the serial data that the slaves receive to my desktop computer so that I can verify that they are receiving the correct commands. I can’t claim that I entirely know what I’m doing… but I sure am having fun!

Here is another shot of my bench setup.