One of my projects involved adding WiFi control to a wired A/C controller. This involved faking button presses with the help of an (unfortunately quite small) ESP8266 board and a number of optocouplers.
I now want to extend the project to also control a damper in the A/C ducting, which normally requires two pins, one for "open" and one for "close".
Unfortunately I have run out of (easy) pins, and I am not prepared to re-implement the project with a different board, so I started looking at ways to minimize the pain.
The solution is to make use of a pin's INPUT mode, which results in a high pin impedance.
Using the resistor values as per schematic, this high impedance results in both transistors having a base-emitter voltage low enough to turn them effectively "off".
Switching back to OUTPUT mode, the pin is either "low" or "high", turning one or the other transistor "on".









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