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Fun with Arduinos Journals/Blogs
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Regular poster 374 posts royhoffman Regular poster 374 posts
royhoffman

Since I met a guy who works at Dell, who told me about such things as Raspberry Pi's and Arduino's, I've been learning and planning some fun projects for Arduinos on my layout. I'm beginning in my city (Philly) area and will try to implement some of the following ideas:

Signaling
Traffic Lights
Building Lighting
Highway Flashers

Later I might get into areas that other MR's are involved in such as 
DCC control of trains and controlling switch machines

My first completed project is a display for 30th Street Station. I used a 4 rows by 20 character LCD display that was enclosed with some black foam board. It really looks cool as it changes to show progress of an Amtrak arrival and departure.

arduino1.jpg 

 

arduino2.jpg 

pwrrpic.jpg 

Roy Hoffman

The S/Sn3 Scale Penn Western Railroad -
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Neil Erickson NeilEr Moderator 5,782 posts
Neil Erickson NeilEr

Great Idea

Roy:

I look forward to following along to see what else you might try. The Arduino had begun to become a hobby on it's own and, although I was having a blast, it consumed a lot of my railroad time. Good luck and have fun!

Neil Erickson 

Neil Erickson, Hawai’i 

My Blogs
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Jim at BSME Prolific poster 2,093 posts
Jim at BSME

Don't reinvent

Nice work on the sign, will have to try and get something like that for our layout, but have several other projects ahead of any new ones!

Be sure the check out (if you haven't already) Geoff Bunza'a blogs, while a lot recent are about DCC he has done others on building animation and vehicles (cranes, and float planes).

Scale Model Animation 8: Starting Projects and Virtual Rooms for Modeling you may want to skip down over the part that tells about using the Arduino and IDE to get to the building lights.

SMA16 –Harry’s TV Shop: New Working HO TV Models for 1964—“In Living Color” & New Sign Too!

For traffic lights check out these two:

Automobile Traffic Lights Animation with the Arduino Pro Mini  the graphics are animated, so watch them for a while before scrolling to the next.

Custom HO Scale Traffic Light  - talks about building traffic lights.
- Jim B.
Baltimore Society of Model Engineers, Estd. 1932
O & HO Scale model railroading
Check out BSME on: Facebook, Instagram
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prostreetamx Active Member 57 posts
prostreetamx

signs and arduino

I also have been messing around with this stuff and bought a bunch of the hardware to build the RFID readers shown last year in Model Railroader. I have plans for many more projects in the future. For a scrolling sign on my layout I went with something much simpler. I purchased several LED name badges that are programmable but not to the extent you used for your sign that posts updated info. I plan to use mine on a post mounted sign on one of my large warehouses to announce a car show that will be taking place in the parking lot on the weekends. For that purpose I only need th scroll a simple message. I hadn't thought of using an Arduino but I probably have everything already to duplicate your idea. I purchased several support equipment hardware kits when some of my local Radio Shacks closed.
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