One of my hopes for the garden railroad is to be able to build some of my own electronics for it. Whether some off-track movement or lights, or a piece of automation that helps manage the trains. It would be very useful to be able to control the automation from the DCC throttle. So there is my starting point: build an Arduino system that listens to DCC and does something with the signal.  After some searching on line I found several options and settled on the basic design from  Dave Bodnar at Train Electronics . One of the components needed is an optocoupler. I wasn't familiar with this so did some reading and turns out, this is a pretty ingenious little device. It provides a way to have signals pass from a high voltage part of a circuit (for me DCC running at about 15-18V) to a low voltage part (the Arduino at 3.3 or 5V) while having them electrically isolated. The incoming signal get converted to light (hence to opto-) which is picked up by a photodetector and sent ba...

 This is part 2 of  How Far Do We Go  from a few months ago. I left off there with a working prototype of an Arduino-based odometer installed in my refrigerator car. That car was part of a starter kit and doesn't fit well with my theme right now so it is doing duty as a utility and testing car. It was the first car where I replaced the default hook-and-loop coupler with a knuckler coupler. It now is the transition between the starter set and a few of cars I have acquired that came with knuckle couplers. However, as I ended the previous post, that car didn't lend itself very well to having a display or a battery pack with easy access.  So I've torn that all out and started with a fresh design. The new design would have a four-line LED display, instead of two-line, to show more data and I decided to have a dedicated Arduino board. After trying a few combinations, I realized that the coal tender would be a perfect place for the odometer. It has a removable coal load wit...

On Easter weekend old 814 went out for a run with the first tourists of the season. The plants were blooming and the dinos well behaved. 

This is the first of what hopefully will be several posts that are focused on electronics projects. I have been developing an interest in electronics, and Arudino in particular, along side the model trains. As described in a recent post about building an odometer for the train , when including a switch care must be taken to avoid " switch bounce " or the mechanical rapid bouncing as the switch is triggered or released. If the program is fast enough, these bounces will be seen as separate events when you are expecting it to be a single event. This can be addressed either in the software or through circuit design. Since I wanted to use an interrupt for the trigger and am not sure of how fast the railcar might go, I decided to use the circuit approach.  I had three circuit design alternatives and wanted to test them out for their effectiveness.  Option #1 : Simplest (and winner) In the Garden Railroad story that inspired the odometer, he uses a 10 nF capacitor in parallel with t...

For a while, I've been wanting to try and combine my nascent interest in electronics with the railroad development. As I've said before, I was never really a hands-on tinkerer growing up but there is something really satisfying with ending up with something that you designed and constructed. I've always been a "designer" but seldom took my ideas to realization until the last several years. Both model railroading and electronics are outlets for taking that next step. Being able to modify some part of the train and do something that it couldn't have done before was an intriguing challenge. I've only started with electronics a couple of years ago when I my wife gave me a SparkFun Inventor Kit . The kit comes with a RedBoard which is their version of an Arduino Uno and comes with a many sensors, motors, and other electronics. Plus a book full of fun projects to learn from.  A few years ago I was inspired by an article in Garden Railways magazine by Del Tapparo...

From early on I've desired to have sounds coming from my engine to add to the joy of running it. While I wanted realistic sounding steam engine noises, for the first couple of years I had to satisfy myself with the occasional leaf getting caught between the wheels.  While it was pleasantly reminiscent of a baseball card in my bike spokes, I never really knew when it was going to start or end and it wasn't very prototypical. The Piko starter engine I have doesn't have a lot of room inside for add-ons. Looking around I learned that sound system, batteries, and other things too large to fit inside the engine are often held in converted box cars or the tender that comes with many smaller engines.  My engine has only a small little coal tank so I considered converting the starter kit box car, but I didn't really want to always have a box car on the tourist line. So I decided to buy my first rolling stock to convert and started searching for a tender on eBay. I found one that...

 A warm Thanksgiving message from all of us at the Coastal Titans Railroad to all of you. Enjoy this recent run around the tourist line and see some of the great sights here on Baja Fibiger.   Soon I'll be writing more about the new sounds you here and about the camera work. Until then: HAPPY THANKSGIVING