LCC, For Real
Well, it didn’t take long. The first useful commercial products based on the LCC standards are out, and I have a set. While I may have some reservations about the state of the standards themselves (see my earlier series of posts), I’m very excited to see real products, and at fairly reasonable prices. Well, somewhat reasonable; I’ll have some comments on that.
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Investigating I2C
17 January 2016 23:21 Filed in: Electronics,Testing
Today’s post is going to be one of those interim ones I promised last time, where I report on progress made (or not), mostly about my work with testing the use of I2C as a short-range communications bus.
I decided to start with examining the code I’d written last spring, only to find that most of it was irrelevant as it was doing things the I2C hardware would do for me, or it had functional compromises I didn’t need to make now. About 90% of it got deleted, and I started working on something that would work with I2C, using a couple of my test programs to create a library that front-ends the internal Wire library used to directly control I2C. That’s working to the point that I can pass messages to/from the master, and detect damaged messages, but there’s a lot more to do.
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I decided to start with examining the code I’d written last spring, only to find that most of it was irrelevant as it was doing things the I2C hardware would do for me, or it had functional compromises I didn’t need to make now. About 90% of it got deleted, and I started working on something that would work with I2C, using a couple of my test programs to create a library that front-ends the internal Wire library used to directly control I2C. That’s working to the point that I can pass messages to/from the master, and detect damaged messages, but there’s a lot more to do.
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New Plans for a New Year
I'm going to usher in the new year with a new project, and try to get back to doing more frequent but smaller posts than I've done of late. I'm not quite back to railroading yet, although this is ultimately in support of that. But for the moment, I'm still playing with microelectronics. And today's post is just a summary of where I'm going and what I've done so far, which doesn't amount to much when you put it down in words.
I'm still thinking about and planning the next layout. Control systems are a big part of that, because I was never happy with the DCC-throttle control of turnouts I used on Sumida Crossing, and my attempt at a single big computer-driven system never got off the ground, and would have had some of the same issues if it did.
As you may have noticed, I've spent a lot of time looking at control bus systems over the last two years. I'm still on the fence about what to use, as I don't particularly like any of the current systems. LCC has promise, but so far that's all it has, and I'm not expecting much from it in the next couple of years; it's too new.
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I'm still thinking about and planning the next layout. Control systems are a big part of that, because I was never happy with the DCC-throttle control of turnouts I used on Sumida Crossing, and my attempt at a single big computer-driven system never got off the ground, and would have had some of the same issues if it did.
As you may have noticed, I've spent a lot of time looking at control bus systems over the last two years. I'm still on the fence about what to use, as I don't particularly like any of the current systems. LCC has promise, but so far that's all it has, and I'm not expecting much from it in the next couple of years; it's too new.
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