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.
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):
