ANOTHER NEW INTEREST

Wednesday, April 30, 2014 1:12:10 PM

Well, lately I've gotten interested in some other hobbies. Bought myself a couple of R/C cars, and an OWI Robot arm. Yepper, kinda got off into autonomous-type robotic vehicles, machines & etc., as well as remote controlled manipulation of same. This has some relation to my real world employment- I work in a plastics factory and we use a lot of robots to take parts out of molding machines and so on. And I'm fascinated by computer programming in all of its forms-- getting the evil machine to do what I want it to do.

But the big news is that we're momentarily flush with cashy money so Mrs BC let me buy an Arduino Uno kit- kinda a little embedded computer, self programmable, to automate any project I might build. So I'm stepping off into a new realm of projects, software and hardware.

My other big interest being trains, my current projects tend that way: railroad signals and signalling; railroad interlocking plants (I'm currently struggling with classic mechanical interlocking, re-inventing something from a century ago so that I can understand it.); and Centralized Train Control. ALL of which could utilize a little computerized simplification.

So here's a question: Anybody around here interested in any such stuff: R/C cars? Robotics? Arduino? Train signalling and control?