Nuts and Volts - August 2015

BUILD IT YOURSELF

By Bob Fink

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I've been blessed for many years with having two great hobbies. One is usually enough but when you can use one as a tool to enhance the other, that's pure fun. I've been a scale model railroader for many years, and when PCs and then microcontrollers came along, I found that there are many ways to combine them.

Let me share with you one of the ways I've combined two train "needs" into one computer application.

There have been many hardware and software approaches to getting model railroad grade crossing flashers to operate. All have worked, but they usually just had the flashers come on at one side and then off at the other. Why don't we use the sophistication of a processor like the Arduino to do a more realistic job? And while we are at it, why don't we have the little machine measure and report the train's scale speed as it passes by?