An interlude for a little play time.

Well, that's all pretty serious and, frankly, just a bit scarily earnest. So, how about some play time?

I have all these nice engines lying around. Can I actually get to use them? How about that computer control stuff I was talking about in the 'needs' blog post?

Well, get a load of this video...

I had some awful old Atlas track lying around that I bought second hand. I got out my nice old Santa Fe engine and got a back-and-forth system running using an Arduino, a L298 Motor Shield and a few IR sensors.

The electrics came from Littlebird Electronics. You can find heaps of stuff about Arduinos on the web. These guys are Australian so anything you order will be delivered quickly - they're also really nice to deal with *and* deliver their goods in cute reusable containers which satisfies my 'neatness' fetish.

Of course, you can also buy direct from the USA if you live there - Sparkfun is popular as is Adafruit. Even Amazon!!

I don't want to trivialise this electrical work but it was pretty straight forward - I did build a lot of good wiring and nifty little boards but nothing was too complex. After all, the really hard work is in the pre-fab boards. If you ever need help getting up to speed with this stuff then post a comment and I'll call you!

Of course, the sad part of all this is that my nice little Fleishmann engine burned out just about this time - smoke came out, quite literally. Boo hoo :-(.