Since Kevin at Berrett Hill Trains (a MRH sponsor) sent an email about a once in a lifetime sale, I thought I would let people know they can easily use the touch toggles with the Arduino.
If you are not familiar with his products he makes touch sensitive controls (touch toggles) and control boards that connect to the controlled accessory. He has boards to control stall motor switch machines (e.g. tortoise), snap action machines (e.g. atlas twin coil), servo control and servos for turnouts or other animation, and a relay base to turn on/off heavy loads.
I have experimented with the Berrett Hill momentary touch toggle directly with an Arduino, no need for a control base. Both the momentary touch toggle and standard touch toggle interface amazingly easily, connect power (5 vdc) to the red wire pin, gnd to the brown wire pin, and the orange wire pin to a pin on the Arduino set as a digital input. You can use the Arduino IDE example button code to see how they work, but the momentary puts out a logic 1 (HIGH) until touched with your finger and then outputs a logic 0 (LOW) as long as your finger is present. The green/red toggle toggles the input, green is logic 1 (HIGH) and red logic 0 (LOW).
So now onto the once in a lifetime sale, I checked with Kevin and he is ok with me posting this. In the interest of full disclosure Kevin is a friend of mine and I am a satisfied customer of his. I hope this post doesn't violate any forum rules, but he is a MRH sponsor so figure it is ok.
Here is the email from Kevin:
Quote:
Friends,
We’ve never had a sale, and may never again.
The dog days of summer are here and most of you are far from thinking about your layouts. That has left us here at Berrett Hill time to catch up on building up stock for the fall. Now we’ve got so much stock we are going to have to slow down again! That isn’t good for any of us. So here’s the deal…
This is an offer extended to our previous customers and any of their friends who they’d like to introduce to using Touch Toggles. Share this with your club or group if you’d like. Stash all those parts you know you’re going to need soon!
This is a one-time thing, and is mostly related to our locally-built hands-on assembly methods. Since all of our profits are going straight back into stock production, every part we sell now will keep our crew busy stocking a couple more parts by the fall.
10% off everything. Now through August 16th
When you check out use the coupon code: DOGDAYSDISCOUNT
Find it all at http://www.berretthillshop.com
Our best advertisement is your word of mouth, so go ahead, forward this note and tell your friends.
Your savings now keep us rolling through the summer, so everybody wins.
Thanks for your support,
Kevin Hunter
Berrett Hill Trains
Our stuff is made in the USA.
- Jim B.
Baltimore Society of Model Engineers, Estd. 1932
O & HO Scale model railroading
