Making Trains Move
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...
read moreIntroducing the OpenLCB Development Board (AT90CAN ver.)
I’ve cast my lot with OpenLCB. Having designed a booster, the next logical step is to design a command station (which generates the DCC signal) and a cab (which provides the human interface to the layout). The command station and cab have to talk to each other, and there are a number of possibilities. These include (but are not limited to): Digitrax LocoNet Lenz XpressNet NCE Cab Bus MERG CBUS OpenLCB …&c. LocoNet is particularly popular in North America, being the product of industry giant Digitrax. They even offer a royalty-free license for a usable subset of the protocol....
read moreMore on CmdrArduino: A Library for Building DCC Command Stations with Arduino
I’ve made a dedicated page to house discussion and documentation of CmdrArduino here.
read moreIntroducing CmdrArduino: A Library for Building DCC Command Stations with Arduino
I’ve begun writing a library for Arduino that assists in making DCC command stations, called CmdrArduino. It is available for download or forking from github. CmdrArduino is meant as a middle-layer between the DCC waveform and the cab or cab network. The primary class, DCCPacketOrganizer, provides hooks for sending commands to the rails, such as setting a locomotive’s speed, or switching a turnout. DCCPacketOrganizer takes these commands, makes DCCPacket objects out of them, prioritizes them in queues, and sends packets from the queues to the rails. Right now, the code is...
read moreDCC Waveform Generation with Arduino
I’ve got my Arduino spitting out DCC waveforms, to be fed to a booster. I even have my bread-boarded LOLbooster putting these waveforms to a track, but I don’t yet have the Arduino spitting out meaningful data over the DCC waveform. I’m crossing my fingers that tonight or tomorrow night I’ll have a loco moving in response to an entirely home-brew system. Very exciting! I’ll post code once I’ve got enough that’s worth sharing. Update: See the page on CmdrArduino, my DCC command station library for...
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