Phase II of my miniDCC project

Pictures of your project are nice but technical details would be just as interesting to some.

-- Ray

Very nice.

On 1/12/2008 1:27 PM Anthony Fremont spake thus:

Dunno about inexpensive, but my Paasche VL double-action has performed flawlessly for lo these many years. I recommend it.

"Anthony Fremont" wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@news.supernews.com:

Inexpensive would probably be a can of spray paint. You can get stuff formulated to stick to plastic, or at least a primer for plastics that a paint will stick to.

I've got the Testers cheap air brush that Walmart sells. It's ok, as long as you think of it as a can of spray paint that you can change colors with. It's been used about 20-30 times, and seems to be holding up pretty well.

Puckdropper

Right now there's not much to say that isn't covered here:

It's just my rendition without the walkaround controller. Since I'm using a wall-wart, I put everything inside the project box instead of having two seperate modules. I think I'm going to replace the 12V power supply with a

The source code for the PIC firmware doesn't seem to be available, so I'd have to completely rewrite the code to make any customizations. I'm seriously considering replacing the PIC with an ARM header board (orders of magnitude more powerful than the PIC) so I can do it all in C and make the user interface a little more friendly.

Sorry, mate. For some reason I though this was a new design of your own. I am still interested in your progress so do press on!

Doing something yourself is always rewarding.

-- Ray

From this point forward, it will pretty much be my own design. Especially after I replace the PIC with a "real" processor. ;-) That will make a friendlier user interface a piece of cake. The rest of the circuitry is pretty much required for any DCC system. In fact I need to add an ack detector to make it more complete.

It's usually cheaper too. :-)

The PIC is a very real processor that uses Harvard Architecture to reduce instructions. In surfing the web, I discovered several folk who had designed interfaces to PCs via the parallel port and software in the PC. Looked to me like even an old 386 would make it work. You could always move on to a PC which sort of makes it nothing more than a screen game.

Particularly the decoders for a large herd of engines.

-- Ray

I was just kidding. I've done dozens of PIC projects, I'm just tired of writing miles of PIC assembler to get something done. The PIC is a great processor IMO. The ARM processors offer incredible bang for the buck. I'd say a current ARM7TDMI processor would run rings around an old 386. Easily running at >60MHz and executing nearly every instruction in one clock tick, it really honks. :-)

I intend to add some sort of computer connectable interface. Maybe TCP/IP based, but more likely just a serial interface of some sort.

I'd be looking at 802.11g myself. I mean, why not? There are tons of wireless routers out there just that can be secured just waiting to be bought for $5.00 or under at thrift stores. Computer people don't suffer obsolescence very well. They go for the best and fastest leaving really good stuff in the dumpster.

There's a really inexpensive ethernet design tool out there. Check this out:

-- Ray

On 1/14/2008 1:54 PM Anthony Fremont spake thus:

Macros? That can get you a lot closer to C and more compact code. How's the PIC assembler when it comes to timesavers like those?

PIC assembler supports macros. There are no shortage of C compilers out there for PIC devices. The best being this one:

-- Ray