Skip to main content

Shuttle Plus or Super Shuttle?

 A really interesting project was discussed at tonight's JALSIG Zoom meeting.

The Basic shuttle kit PMP4 was designed in February 2013 and remains one of the most popular Pocket Money Kits. It uses a 555 circuit as a basic timer  and changes the state of a relay to reverse the polarity of the track.

Davy Dick has revisited this circuit but this time used a 14 Pin PIC (16F676) to replicate the circuit and  add a few enhancements to take advantage of the additional pins available.

It is hoped that this will eventually appear as a Pocket Money Kit with PCB sometime in the New Year.

Potential features include adjustable cycle times, controlling semaphore or lights using a delay or detectors set by an option jumper and incorporation of PMP4a  for shuttles with branches.  

Two additional pins might be used to control crossing gates or trigger sound effects or anything else your imagination fancies.

Using around 12 components and some simple coding techniques, this could become a really flexible kit and perhaps by using the 16F18323 PIC ( Newer and cheaper) a reasonably cheap one.

Given that it will remove the requirement for purchasing additional TOTI or PMP4a kits, it will be well worth the money.

Davy explained in his talk the simple building blocks of his code without any fancy structures.

I highly recommend that you watch the talk which will be available in the JALSIG TV area of the MERG website.

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Train sequence / timetable using Arduino

                              Following discussions in a MERG Zoom meeting about potential projects for the Cumbria virtual area group I have started this blog to share my ideas for building a train sequence / timetable system based on an Arduino UNO. The trigger for this project was Andy Robb's article in the MERG journal (June 2020 edition). In it Andy describes using an UNO with a OLED display to produce an electronic station display board.  Having tried out Andy's version I started thinking about expanding the idea and have come up the following list of possibilities: 1. Replace my card index train sequence with an electronic version. 2. Have the train sequence synchronised with the on platform displays. 3. Display an analogue clock on the station display and have it display the train times. 4. Store the position reached in the sequence so that it starts where it left off on power up.  To mak...
8 comments
Read more

Safety in the workshop

 An excellent presentation by Dr. Craig Lennox on workshop safety at today's West of Scotland area group meeting. An amusing but nevertheless serious video was followed by a detailed talk on safety and first aid. I am hoping this talk will be made available on the WOSAG website in due course. The take home message is to ensure your workspace is well ventilated, tidy with no trailing cables. Plan what you are going to do using appropriate tools, avoid distractions and don't rush A clear head is essential. Use PPE where necessary for example ear protection, safety glasses and laser glasses. The risks of burns, cuts, electrical shock and inhalation of dust and fumes were all covered in some detail. Automatic External Defibrillator (AED) are now installed in most supermarkets. A short video was shown illustrating just how easy they are to be used. Excellent talk.  Keep safe everyone.
Post a Comment
Read more

Mimic Points in Visual Basic

For this project, I wanted to create a moving graphic to mimic a set of points moving from one position to the other.  This Blog shows all that is needed. The first Picture shows the 6 lines needed.                                 This Picture shows the Line Properties.    The tracks are shown with 5 lines, though only the middle ones in red are involved.  The other line shown below the others is the one that actually "moves".  It is shown below the other lines for clarity only.  At the start of the Program running, it is positioned over the lower red line. In VB, each Line has properties and these are shown above.  To get a line to appear to move, all that needs to be done is to gradually change the X2 and Y2 co-ordinates of the line. This is the code for the program. The first 6 lines create a pause Function in the program, by using the Computers internal C...
1 comment
Read more