First Railstars Io board assembled
The first of a new breed of layout control hardware. Very excited. Read more about Railstars Io, and how it will change model railroad control, here.
read moreRailstars Io Being Fabricated
The Io OpenLCB / NMRAnet demonstration boards are off to the fab house! Hoping they made it out in time before the Chinese New Year.
read moreNorthern Star DCS: A Straw Poll
Although the Northern Star DCS (Digital Control Station) will be designed to be usable out of the box, there are always bits and bobs that end users might like to configure. Also, many users will want to use their personal computer as a controller. I’m trying to decide on the best approach to doing this right now, understanding that there are costs to each option. Please leave a comment and tell me what you think! Separate device: Pros: Frees up processor for the central tasks running trains. Permits use of standardized OpenLCB configuration programs (maybe). Allows each user to...
read moreMaking 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 moreOpenLCB Dev Board ICSP Header Fix
So, the REV B hardware has a problem, in that I brought the wrong SPI pins out for the ICSP programming header. Oops. The good news is that with a breadboard and a little ingenuity, the fix is easy. The better news is that, as far as I know, the JTAG header is just fine (but we’ll find out when I get my JTAG programmer in the mail). Read on for the fix. If you’ve ever gotten the dreaded “Device signature = 0×000000″ error trying to program an AT90CAN128, then the fix below is probably for you as well. First, the fix is much easier if you use female headers in the...
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