Controling 300 LED's using .net or COM?

Is it possible to connect 300 LED's or light bulbs to a computer and controls the on and offs of these lights using .net or COM?

You are going to need a bit of kit to do it... We are using W&T IO boxes to controll traffic lights and road gates, but I think each one only does up to 12 devices - obviously you are going to need something on a bigger scale, but it is nice as you communcate with it over TCP/IP.

Is there any url online location where i can read about it? what is W&T IO Boxes? and how to talk to it? .net? com?

http://www.wut.de/e-5763w-13-faus-000.php3

Like I say the one we are using controls up to 12 things at once. It plugs in to an ethernet port and communcations is via TCP/IP so its straight sockets stuff in .net. I'm sure there must be something out there that does what you want though. Are you looking at producing some kind of signage?

Do you have any hardware to interface these to the PC yet?  How fast an update will you need? 

I had a look at doing this a while back and was going to end up with a load of small AVR based addressable controllers hooked onto a RS485 bus.  In that case .Net would have no issues controlling them. 

 i need to 300 lights, for an assambly company, i want to put this lights to 300 shelves, each shelve can have a red light, or green, for ready or not ready, each shelve will represent a specific order, using a computer, i will control these lights/shelve to see if the orders is completed and put the correct light on

http://www.codeproject.com/csharp/csppleds.asp is this on the right track?

each order can have several pepole responsible to fullfill this order, so when a person puts into the selve his/her part of the order, using a bar code, he/she will scan it via the main computer which controls all shelves. the computer will recognize the orderid, will bling with a red light, to dictate for the user where to put the part, if the computere recogzies that all of the required compoments if fullfilled, the computer will change the light to green, which means the person that packes it and shippes it can take this order from the shelve and finishe it.

Shrage wrote:

Is it possible to connect 300 LED's or light bulbs to a computer and controls the on and offs of these lights using .net or COM?

there is an LED sign that I almost used a while back you may want to look into.

there is a codeproject thing with a .net project to control that display.  it was a multi-color LED sign with a *LOT* of LED's on it.

serial cable interface on that sign.

Thanks so much guys i have got here all info i needed.

how about something like http://www.devasys.com/usbi2cio.htm 20 lines per board, even do ten packs!  Or http://www.kadtronix.com/digio.htm

If you wired the LEDs correctly you could have the red on when the pin was low and geen when the pin goes high, halving the number of lines you need.