Learning XTrackCAD
Today's post is about my latest (and more successful) attempt to learn to use XTrackCAD for layout design (see diagram above). I've made a few half-hearted attempts in the past, but was always turned off by the amount of up-front work needed to learn the dang thing. It's not at all obvious, at least not to me. This time I started knowing it was going to be a pain, but with the commitment to see that through.
Much of what I learned was basic, but some of it was very specific to what I'm doing, which is a flex track layout in Japanese N scale. If you weren't already aware, Japanese N is 1:150 scale rather than the usual 1:160 used in American/European N, and, oddly, for Japanese Shinkansen models, but I'm modeling normal trains for the most part. And I'm also planning to hand-lay at least some turnouts using the Fast Tracks jigs, although that turned out to be a lot simpler to design in XTrackCAD than I'd expected.
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Much of what I learned was basic, but some of it was very specific to what I'm doing, which is a flex track layout in Japanese N scale. If you weren't already aware, Japanese N is 1:150 scale rather than the usual 1:160 used in American/European N, and, oddly, for Japanese Shinkansen models, but I'm modeling normal trains for the most part. And I'm also planning to hand-lay at least some turnouts using the Fast Tracks jigs, although that turned out to be a lot simpler to design in XTrackCAD than I'd expected.
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Memory and the Arduino
06 June 2016 00:12 Filed in: Electronics
It's been a while since my last post, as I've been deep in a programming project and not working on anything else. It's model railroad-related, and I’ve written a lot of code, but as yet it doesn’t actually do anything and there's nothing really interesting to say about it. I’ll write about it when I actually have it doing something. Maybe next month.
But, as is usual for me, along the way I've tripped over a few of my own misconceptions, and learned a number of useful things. One of the latter is that I now know a heck of a lot more than I really wanted to about Arduino memory use, and in particular about how that changes in the Cortex ARM M0+. Since this version of the Arduino doesn't seem to be well-documented online yet, I thought I'd write up some notes about what I’d learned. This is fairly off-topic for a model railroading blog, but since a lot of what I'm doing these days relates to model railroad control and signaling systems using the Arduino and other microprocessors, it's not entirely off-topic.
And if you skip to the end, you'll find a useful function if you're programming one of these.
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But, as is usual for me, along the way I've tripped over a few of my own misconceptions, and learned a number of useful things. One of the latter is that I now know a heck of a lot more than I really wanted to about Arduino memory use, and in particular about how that changes in the Cortex ARM M0+. Since this version of the Arduino doesn't seem to be well-documented online yet, I thought I'd write up some notes about what I’d learned. This is fairly off-topic for a model railroading blog, but since a lot of what I'm doing these days relates to model railroad control and signaling systems using the Arduino and other microprocessors, it's not entirely off-topic.
And if you skip to the end, you'll find a useful function if you're programming one of these.
Read More...
