Please comment and let me know what you’re thinking! I am looking for ideas, feedback, just about anything at all you can say constructively. Don’t think one of my projects will work? Let me know. Like my idea on an Arduino Model Railroad Turntable? Let me know. Hate the color scheme of the blog? Tell me about it. Love my Model Railroad Scale Speed Calculator? Have a great idea for a project? Let’s talk about it. Just say so. I want and openly invite community contribution here. I am also considering allowing selected contributors to write posts and submit hacks. If you’re interested in doing so, please drop me a line via the contact form. 
Continue reading »
Jul 282010
I have finally started working on my first TRUE model railroading hack and this one is really cool! It uses Arduino, like many of the model railroading hacks I have floating around in my head or on the back of napkins, to control a model railroad turntable. For those who don’t already know, a turntable is a large turning platform with a track on it that a locomotive can drive onto and then be turned around to other tracks or even 360 degrees within the locomotives own length. Click here for a closer look at rail turntables on Wikipedia. What makes this any different than any number of model railroading turntable kits that might exist or why is it better than just sticking a motor onto the turntable with a switch? Well, because this is a micro-controlled turntable that’s why! Other turntables are not often precise and frequently misalign. The hack I am describing here uses the Arduino Duemilanove microcontroller coupled with an Adafruit Servo Motor shield to control a stepper motor and get positional feedback from opto-interrupters positioned to stop the turntable (via a deftly programmed Arduino sketch) precisely at an adjoining track location and be accurate and repeatable. I want the control panel input to the Arduino be nothing more than a rotary switch with each pole telling the Arduino to spin the turntable to a different fixed position for the turntable. Maybe an LED for each position could be used at the control panel as feedback. I want to use a stepper motor with at least a right angle gear box with good reduction so it can be easily located directly under the turntable and have enough oommph to spin large, heavy brass locomotives around. I was thinking about this relatively inexpensive (hey it’s only $16.95!) 3.3V stepper motor with built-in 180 degree gear reduction unit from MPJA, Inc. I have seen this exact motor unit built-into homemade CNC routers as a 4th axis to spin long material and use the router much like a CNC lath – good for carving ornate pool cues, spindles etc… This unit works well, is readily available all over the internet, meets my somewhat arbitrary requirements, and is dirt cheap! Can’t beat that! 
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 »
Well I started working on the foundations of a many of my upcoming Arduino Model Railroading hacks. It’s a very basic circuit (many will recognize it from one of the Arduino website tutorials) that turns an RC servo as you turn a potentiometer. Not much I know but think of this controlled via Xbee wireless to a Arduino Nano installed inside a model train! Kewl! All the kewl, devious things I can tilt, pan, zoom, lift, move, etc…. muwhahahahahahahahah! Sorry, that’s my evil scientist laugh. Hell this could even actuate turntables, drawbridges, turnouts, and more throughout a layout. Instead of using a potentiometer which gives you proportional control, you could use a multi-position rotary switch for something like a turntable to give discrete positions (engine bays in a roundhouse). I think you would still need some kind of sensor, like an opto-interupter to get precise indexing of the turntable rails to the spur track rails but I am getting way ahead of myself and out of the scope of this post. Anyrate, I have a video I will be posting later so you can see this neat little circuit in all of it’s glory! To the right is an illustration of the circuit (click for a larger view):
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 »
