Sending DCC With An Arduino
In my last post I mentioned that I now have 2 Arduino controller boards for experimenting with creating my own DCC command station, booster and DCC decoder. However, one of the problems with developing your own software and hardware that works together is that when something doesn’t work it can be difficult to figure out just where the problem is.
To help get around this I figured that it should be possible to simplify things by hooking two Arduinos directly together and send DCC commands from one to the other. This would at least ensure that the software was working before even having to think about the electronics.
So that’s what I did, and it worked! (Read more)
So It begins...again
Well that was fun. It seems that sometime over the last year since I updated my blog, wordpress became borked and all my posts are gone. I do have a backup somewhere but for now I am just going to start again.
So where were we? In my last blog I documented some experiments I made in building my own n scale turnouts, which though time consuming, turned out pretty well. After I’d made a few turnouts I started looking for ways to cheaply and easily activate them. I did some experiments using small rc servos which were successful but I thought they sounded rather noisy. I then tried some ‘muscle wire’ which also worked well though there were some issues.
At some point in the future I’ll try to recreate some of these posts, but for now I am taking a different direction - I am going to try and build my own DCC command station and booster, then see if I can get my new Bachmann Spectrum N Scale GE 44-Ton Switcher up and running. To that effect I now have two Arduino microcontroller boards, so that is where I’ll begin…
