Crossing Flasher update

Electronics, Trains

A while ago received an Amazon.com gift certificate, it wasn’t a lot but it turns out you can get a lot of inexpensive electronic components from re-sellers (the ones in particular I bought from were based in China). Part of my order came in (it takes a long time for things to ship from China evidently) which spurred me to pull out my crossing flasher project to continue some work.

The parts I received were servos, I’m going to try to only use one but I’ve got two just in case I can’t make the rigging work. Fortunately servos are pretty easy to control with an Arduino but I came to the conclusion I needed to solve for sound before I finalized pin assignments for the lights, and servos, and sensors.

I finally decided on an Adafruit arduino shield that has an SD card reader and can play simple mono wave files (it’s a bell, doesn’t need anything complex). Even better its available as a kit! -> https://www.adafruit.com/products/94

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Since I was making an order I decided to upgrade my soldering iron to one a bit better than the cheapy radio shack one which ended up being a great purchase!

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I actually got it assembled last week but didn’t get time to test it till tonight (which it worked, yay I’m not incompetent and following directions).

With this working I need to start figure out pin assignments and start prototyping the servo and sensor control before wiring it all up!

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