Goals

• Get a train to move
• Get a good packet sent
• Test all stations

Tasks accomplished

Over the past week a lot of time has been spent on bringing the old hardware back online. On Tuesday we were able to work with the Professor who designed the track and communication protocols many years ago. This allowed us to try sending test packets via RealTerm to an individual station. This allowed us to perform a quick diagnostics on a station but we needed to be next to a computer.

To make it easier to perform the diagnostics a board was designed that would plug into each station and transmit the appropriate packets to power up all of the train tracks. This board will also be able to interface with the BlueTooth connection.

The board had 2 LDOs, one to step from the power supply to 5V and one to step from 5V to 3.3V. This was required since the PIC runs at 3.3V but the UART must be at 5V.

Problems

• Power supply for PIC
• BlueTooth connections

To do

Next week the objectives are:

• Build a protoboard with the components
• Run diagnostics on all stations
• Update code to test all PICs and sections of track
• Start to develop switching logic.