Some video of the new layout.

I've been running my engines using a very poor old wower unit. I got really tired of it today and did a quick hack job on an Arduino system to run 2 trains using 2 pots to control spped and direction. Nice and easy - took me 20 minutes total.

Anyway, here's some nice videos of it all running...

Shift Registers

I'm trying to get as much I/O out of a simple Arduino board as possible and I have previously written about shift registers and their use here.


I thin thought about designing my own PCB to use this and discovered this little beauty on the littlebirdelectronics web site.


I've bought a few and am using them to drive LEDs for signals, relays and some ULN2803s. You can get some nice right angle headers to make it easy to daisy chain these bad boys. Some photos below.

Daisy chained and plugged into a breadboard using the long headers made popular for Arduino shields.

All driven by 3 pins on the Arduino.