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.
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