Suppose I have a TTL output pin, and I want to use it to switch something that pulls a lot of current.
I've been driving a relay through a switching transistor. But are there better alternatives?
In my ideal world, there'd be a DIP that I could control from a microprocessor without having to mess about with transistors, and could switch multi-amp current. Ideally switching fast enough that I could do PWM control.
How close can we get?
-- The twentieth century was one in which limits on state power were removed in order to let the intellectuals run with the ball, and they screwed everything up and turned the century into an abattoir... We Americans are the only ones who didn't get creamed at some point during all of this. We are free and prosperous because we have inherited political and value systems fabricated by a particular set of eighteenth-century intellectuals who happened to get it right. But we have lost touch with those intellectuals. - Neal Stephenson