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Sunday's West of Scotland Area Group Zoom meeting

 Another very well attended Zoom meeting with 34 participants.

Davy showed us the commercially available automatic train stopping unit available at £12.53 from Brimar and compared it with the almost identical PMP 15 kit from the MERG Kitlocker at  only £2.65.

 With these kind of savings, MERG membership is worth every penny.


Chic Thomson treated us to a very entertaining presentation on simulation software for Electronics.

INKSCAPE is a free open  source drawing package.

There are many Arduino Simulators available but Arduino Simulator 1.5.1 is an excellent open source offering. 

For those interested in PICs simulators are available within the JAL compiler (Just Another Language) and MPLAB Sim is available within MPLAB but seldom advertised.

Electronics Workshop 5.1 is a program no longer being developed but a useful tool for investigating any electrical or electronic circuit. Apparently you can Google it but there are a few insecure sites so be careful.

Fritzing is a very popular program for Arduino hobbyists as the library contains many of the sensors and modules that are available for interfacing to the different Arduino platforms. Free versions used to be available but the latest download is available for 8 Euros ( around £7 )

Lochmaster is a great tool for developing stripboard designs and has been previously demonstrated by Davy Dick.

KICAD is the open source replacement for the PCB design software EAGLE.

Design Spark sponsored by RS Components does the same thing, There is also a mechanical and electrical package available.

Thanks Chic for a great session

Andy R

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