[docdavies]

Jet,

Yeah, that's the conclusion I've come to as well. I had hoped for a minimum of additional components and such, but I need transistors to drive the Festo's as well, so guess I'll go that route. My ideal solution is to develop an Arduino shield that I can plug the cRIO end of DB37 from the digital side car directly into, to minimize the fuss of conversion. I take heart that the new 4 slot cRIOs are cheaper...but they still toooooo expensive for a couple of old robots or playing around, and here of course I mean "serious experimentation".
On the positive side, I'm having a great time with my Arduino and have found one of it's cousins, the Netduino, equally intriguing. I see a lot of home automation, hobby robotics, quadcopters and robotic arms in my future. Now if I can just get my son to work out the wireless aspects of the connection from drive station to Arduino / Netduino.....
Y'all will probably see posts on that some time soon!
Doc