RSS Fetcher Posted November 25, 2018 Share Posted November 25, 2018 Whatever my track layout will be (still thinking about that ), it'll need some points. But this time, I've decided I shall NOT have a tangle of wires under the board! Even on a small layout, tracing wires/faults/feeds etc can be a right pain in the neck! So the plan is to have one pair of wires to feed DCC everywhere, and another 4-wire cable to feed digital point control using i2c or similar control. Although I've a collection of old Peco point motors, I can't say I've ever been keen on their 'snap-snap' whether using AC pulses or DC capacitor discharge. Reading through many threads and blogs here, it seems servos are a good way to go. Suitably encouraged, I sent off for some servos, an Arduino nano and some I/O expanders. Actually, they are cheap clones because I've no idea whether it'll work out or not. Then I threw the lot together on a breadboard, cobbled some program code together, and this is what I have today: Now I should admit here that I have a background in electronics and IT, so doing this wasn't at all fearsome! However, I am amazed how easy it is to put the pieces together. The Arduino libraries cover a huge wealth of functionality, so it's really a case of integrating the parts with some C code statements and testing. The nano is particularly easy to use because the USB interface makes uploading binaries a doddle. What have I been missing?! The outline design is thus: Not very elegant, but I hope it gets the idea across. So far, 15 switch inputs are working on the nano - the maximum that can be configured without input multiplexers or shift registers. My expanders are actually 16-way, but they were cheap and had easy-to-use libraries available. So here's hoping these boards will fit quietly under the baseboards and 'just work'! P.S. I'll post the code when I get chance. Attached thumbnail(s) View the full article Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
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