In my home, I have a 4 zone Rainbird system. I was looking at the cool IOShield, however, since I only have 4 zones, I am thinking I should be able to use the other GIO pins to turn on zones. The only benefit I see is the IOShield already has options for the 24V input. Besides the 24V input, is there any reason why I can't use a standard Moteino to control the sprinklers?
If you can assert your sprinkler controller zones from the GPIO of a Moteino or any other microcontroller, you're gold.
The IOShield was designed to make it a little easier, to have some visual feedback with LED's for each zone right on the board, and allow up to 16 zones without eating up the GPIO on the Moteino. It could also just be used as a general purpose serial-to-parallel shift register.
The LED indicator was also a great selling feature. I am regretting removing the ioshield from my recent order. I will consider picking on up once I get my new weather shields and gateway deployed.
Thanks for the feedback.