I have to apologize to all the trackhacker.com followers out there for letting the site sit so long without updating it. I lost my job in March and then had to deal with a host of medical problems my wife is experiencing while trying to fight depression myself. Life got complicated and busy really fast and I am only now just getting things back under control so I apologize for the hiatus. Not making excuses, just explaining what happened.
Jun 152011
JT continues his series on Building and Programming the Fabulous Fabio “Arduino-Compatible” Controller Board:
Setting Z-axis milling depth with conical engraving bits.
The Fabio Arduino clone PCB was milled into .062” (1/16”) FR4 PCB material with a 1oz. copper cladding (weight of copper is 1 ounce per square foot). The CNC engraver / CNC Router was fitted with a 45 degree engraving bit from Think & Tinker LTD. I picked this bit so I could adjust the width of the cut by specifying the depth of cut and still make some narrow cuts. If you do the math (Geometry, actually), you come up with a formula that tells you how deep to make a cut for a desired cut width and tool tip included angle. To make things easy for you (and me) I developed a spreadsheet for various engraving bit included tip angles as shown below: Continue reading »
Notes on building and programming the Fabulous Fabio “Arduino-compatible controller” board from the Make Your Bot! website (makeyourbot.org) – This is the first in a series of Fabio Arduino-Clone related posts from Track Hacker member JT. Thank you for all of the hard work that has gone into this and for sharing it with the Track Hacker community! -craigbic (admin)
Note: weblinks have been footnoted and moved to the bottom.
Over the last six months, I’ve built, tuned, and tested a 3-axis CNC machine based on plans from Rockcliff Machine [1] Now that it is functioning and capable of milling PCBs, I decided to experiment with using it as an “Additive Manufacturing” machine, in other words, a rapid prototyping machine under computer control that uses extruded plastic filaments to build a structure based on commands generated from a processed CAD file. Continue reading »
Well I said I was going to run the Interfacing Flash and Arduino, from scratch tutorial from jpcote’s blog in my previous post on Using Arduino with Adobe Flash for Model Railroading. Well I had the chance to do that today and it worked brilliantly! Hooray!I have taken a few pictures of my Arduino Duemilanove board with the Adafruit protoshield installed with the LED in place along with a short video demonstrating the LED blinking with the “Blink” sample Adobe Flash program communicating with the Arduino updating it’s status from waiting to blinking. Doesn;’t sound like much and I’m sure you’re wondering what this all has to do with model railroading so I’ll tell you – this opens up a whole new realm of possible model railroad Arduino hacks such as creating a cool Flash control interface that looks like a locomotive control panel or a dispatchers panel that interfaces with sensors on the model railroad layout for realtime data along with a micro camera on the model locomotive for realtime video with the ability to control turnouts, lighting, and the trains themselves. Who knows, the sky is the limit as I am an experienced Flash programmer and feel right at home working in the Flash IDE with Actionscript. I can’t wait to start controlling trains and collecting data from a model railroad through an Arduino board using Adobe Flash.
Jun 302010
I came across a terrific tutorial explaining how to interface Adode Flash with an Ardunio microcontroller. I realize, again, that this is probably old hat to everyone but it’s all new and exciting to me. I followed somebody else’s hack on connecting an Arduino and using it’s hardware to manipulate Flash but it was very confusing and I kludged my way through it. The Interfacing Flash and Arduino, from scratch tutorial on jpcote’s blog was very intuitive and well written. Interfacing Flash with Arduino hardware is important for several reasons, first and foremost is I am an experienced Actionscript programmer and know Flash intimately. I want to be able to access the Arduino hardware and monitor sensors, stream video, capture data etc…. all through a really whizbang Flash interface. Continue reading »
Jun 172010
I thought I would take a second to post that I have discovered an open-source micro-controller development board called Arduino. Yeah, I know, I know….it’s been around for a long time. Well, I’m a bit slow. This thing is great! It takes a cool 8-bit micro-controller and all the supporting circuits and sticks it on one board and breaks out all of the I/O pins to headers for easy connection. It uses a modified version of C to write firmware which can be quickly developed in the free IDE software and then uploaded to the Arduino board, which has a bootloader already on it making things a snap, via USB. All for under $30! How cool is that 
? Continue reading »
