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First post ... woohoo!

Coming soon, all these and more signals controlled by one single Arduino pin!

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Pi Pico, we smell competition in the land of the RRRduino! 

Pi Pico on an N-scale gondola Pi Pico, we smell competition in the land of the ‘duino!  Our very favorite low cost microcontroller system is seeing some fresh competition.  Everyone by now has heard about the Raspberry Pi, some fruity company in the United Kingdom, making single board computers!  They run Raspbian (or other flavors of Linux and are capable of some Windows versions) for as little money as $10 for the Pi Zero W.  The more popular Model 4, with 2 GB of RAM, retails for about $29.  Add a $5  micro SD card and you have a real computer with which you can surf the internet, write code and even program Arduinos.  It also runs our other favorite, JMRI.  Of course, plug it into a small or big screen television with an HDMI cable and you can even stream Netflix.  If you want a really cool computer built into a keyboard, also check out the brand new, Raspberry Pi 400 , you might just think you own a ZX Spectrum again. These are all “comp...
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Roll-up Doors with a State Machine

Roll-up a door please!  (with a State Machine in code, part 1) MHO Junction’s Molson Brewery in a 3D Layout View ( all photos and drawings by Lloyd Henchey, Ontario, Canada) We all know we can open and close close something with an Arduino and a Servo, but what if we want to a little bit more operating fun with some lights and sounds, all after a manager gives approval to open or close the door to the beer brewery before your engine is allowed to pick up or deliver a car? Control Panel at the brewery   Six doors under construction at the Molson brewery on the MHO Junction  Engine pulls up to the red light, shift manager (operator) grants permission, door raises up with alarms and a flashing red light, door goes all the way up, light turns green , engine or car can proceed! Same flashing red light going down and maybe different door squeaking noises. All good articles start with a YouTube video: youtube.com/watch?v=-8EnpUgTqR4 ! This article will introduce you to a “Fi...
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Not RRRduino, unless you have an MQTT connection via Ethernet or WiFi

JMRI code to connect to an MQTT broker, to publish and subscribe to the messages for signal masts. Of course, we agree to a standard for the MQTT topics, and since you were not here, we settled on "mast.xxxx" where xxxx is a number starting at zero. This MQTT topic is used as the User Name in a JMRI signal mast. Created as a Virtual Mast with the Aspect used as the payload in the message. And, yes, the device under the real mast needs to be programmed with the same name and code for each of the "aspect" payloads to be implemented. A yellow and red LED'd dwarf signal can not do a "Clear" aspect, so make sure "Clear" is maybe set to yellow for "Approach" as well.    Virtual Masts with agreed upon User Names. Comments are for the One Wire Signals on the NeoPixel string (see prior post)   Virtual Mast The Jython (or Python) code shown here below, is to attach a Listener to each Signal Mast, and to publish a message ...
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