21st Century MCUs

Posted by on 25 Jul, 2011 in Announcements | 4 comments

To date, I’ve focused my development on the venerable Atmel AVR series, in particular the ATmega328 and AT90CAN128 microcontrollers. These are 8-bit MCUs (the first of which is the brains in Arduino) running at about 16MHz. Nothing fancy, but they get the job done. But lately, I’ve been feeling the pinch for more. An ATmega328 DCS (digital command station) can keep track of, currently, at most 5 concurrent trains, and the AT90CAN127 as many as 20. That’s not a lot. While the AT90CAN128 can be fitted with external memory, I worry about the available processing power needed to...

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Making Trains Move

Posted by on 23 Jun, 2011 in Announcements | 16 comments

I’ve hidden myself in a closet for the last month or so working on putting together a demo showing how OpenLCB can be used to control trains. The demo consists of two parts: A device to talk to humans, which I call a throttle, and a device to talk to trains, which I call (following common nomenclature) a command station. The two devices talk to each other via OpenLCB. The command station talks to trains using DCC. Both the command station and the throttle are my own OpenLCB Dev Boards running Arduino sketches. You can see the demo in person—perhaps a little more exciting than...

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