June 30, 2014

More Construction Progress

Got a few hours this weekend to continue working on my model of the dock.  Made some minor adjustments to the previous built section (cutting and re-fitting), and hunkered down and fabricated the long single track section of the structure:

New section of the dock

Overall View of the project so far

June 18, 2014

Sizing up the Dock

Spent some time tonight playing with a scaled up blueprint of the ATSF China Basin ferry slip.  As a result, I'm going to tweak the dock build a bit and even shorten the moving element of the float bridge.  It is pretty close, and matches nicely with the NScaleShips float barge.


June 7, 2014

DCC Shield

When I first was getting into Arduino, one thing I always wanted to do was create a DCC-controlled Arduino project, but my day job has been pretty much all-consuming.

I ran into my buddy Kevin a few years back and he was thinking the same thing— so I drew up a quick circuit for him to try:



My buddy Kevin beat me to the punch by creating a DCC_Decoder library and DCC_Monitor example sketch:


Fast forward a few years, and I managed to design a shield version of the circuit when I had some vacation time stacked up.  A few weeks ago I got my PCBs and spent about an hour this weekend putting together the first prototype:


After some fumbling with the attachInterrupt API (I'm using a Leonardo), I'm now decoding DCC packets: