Ever hear of this, a friend just bought one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgPpBRbBsIE
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Yeah, I've looking into Arduino and its a nice system. I decided not to go there for a host of reasons that have nothing to do with the quality of the system or its usefulness for this and other purposes (high or both counts). It can do train and particularly accessory control nicely, I imagine.
Hi George -
My son and I have worked with both Arduino and the similar Raspberry Pi processors. We've created some home automation projects, like an automatic irrigation system that reads the weather and you can control from your phone, as well as a few things related to his engineering studies.
It's cool stuff, it's relatively inexpensive, and there is a lot of code and documentation BUT it's a big time investment. Especially if you're looking to roll your own. What little stuff I have is conventional and I plan to sort of keep it that way mostly and hope to someday come back to this for automation.
For a business client in the oil and gas business, I'd proposed a system where employees could interact over the internet with a large diorama of a refinery via kiosks setup in their offices. It was primarily run via these processors. Had the initial research and did some early prototype and app development work done but was a victim of budget cutbacks.
If you have the time and inclination it could be a ton of fun. For a couple hundred bucks you can do some pretty amazing stuff. I wish I had the time.
There are some folks here on the forum that are using them for some train control. As Frisco Tim says there will be some time invested in learning it all, but it is not that difficult.
For getting started they have starter kits that include an Arduino board, cables, sensors and instructions for the different projects. Some include sample code for the projects. If you are new to Arduino, I would definitely go with a starter kit to get going. That's what I did.
I got my kit from Sparkfun when they had a one day 50% off sale. It was a very noce kit and very informative. Similar items are offered on ebay, but I don't know the details on their instructional information. Sparkfun has a ton of information to help you with just about everything. Lots of electronic geeks there that know everything about electronics and not just Arduino. They have a good website to learn from.
Which ever way you go it's fun and a great learning experience if you are interested in electronics, robotics and etc. There is also Beaglebone, some Intel items, Raspberry Pi and more. Some are quite advanced, more so than the Arduino. Arduino also has several different boards with different levels of capabilities and it is all open source and free to use by anyone. I don't know if the others are open source or not?
They are all really worth spending some time on further investigation though.
Like rtr12 says - it's not super difficult, especially if you have some electronics and programming familiarity. We purchased some of our original kits through Adafruit (http://www.adafruit.com/) and bought a lot of sensors and other boards on eBay with mostly good results. It's become a little cottage industry of folks making different applications for these processors. For example, this is what we used for our irrigation system: http://rayshobby.net/opensprinkler/
As far as I know most of these are open source. People are doing the darndest things with these. Instructables and Make: were other sources for projects, ideas and code.
Every thing that you need is on the Internet.
You can get the Arduino Uno off of E-Bay or other suppliers.
The programming software is located at the Arduino website.
It has all the info on the Arduino.
You can easily find tutorials and other information by doing a web search.
In a previous thread I went over some things I'm working on with arduino and trains, at the moment everything is breadboards and bad coding, but I'm hoping to get things further along.
About 4 pages into this thread I started in on some things I had in mind.
https://ogrforum.com/t...-outdated-technology
At this point, I am reading tmcc remote commands into arduino, and posting them to a webpage hosted on my home network, as well as reading commands from the webpage and sendting them through arduino to the tmcc base. Also have a very rudimentary project going to run LionChief loco's from the Cab-1 as you would any tmcc loco. at the moment, I've gotten a bit side tracked working on some non train related things.
Moving on to the simpler side of things, I think arduino is something many folks into model railroading should at least look into. Not for "complex" things like reinventing control systems, but for simple things, like making lights blink when a train passes or such. There is a lot to be said for only having to learn one device and using it to run any electrical thing you can dream up. Add to that that as little as $5.00 will do anything you want with a minimum of fuss. Yes, sometimes , a few discrete components will do the job just fine, but often the price tag adds up rather quickly.
Anyway, I think I rambled enough in other threads, but the bottom line is that these are amazing little boards, and it is really amazing to me to see the 'Maker' movement growing strong around the idea that doing hands on things can be fun for people.
"Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work." - Thomas A. Edison
