The Digital Green Certificate (sometimes named green pass) is a digital certificate, common throughout Europe, which proofs that a person: is vaccinated against COVID-19 received a negative test result recovered from COVID-19 It’s normally issued as a qrcode, to speed up its reading by checking apps. On a technical level, the personal information of the…
Today, in the new episode of my tutorial about how to control a digital model railway with Arduino, let’s learn together how to build a board for Loconet control panels. In the previous tutorials, we used an Arduino Uno board, connected to different interfaces, to create command stations, decoders and digital sensors. Thanks to a…
Today, in the new episode of my tutorial about how to control a digital model railway with Arduino, let’s learn together how to use the Loconet Control Panel with DCC++ Command Station. If your command station supports the Loconet bus, the turnout commands sent by the control panel are received directly by the command station,…
Today, in the eighth episode of my tutorial about how to control a digital model railway with Arduino, let’s learn together how to build a turnout control panel connected to the Loconet bus. In an analog layout, it is normal to use pushbuttons to control turnouts and signals In the transition to digital control, these pushbuttons…
Today, in the seventh episode of my tutorial about how to control a digital model railway with Arduino, let’s learn together how to make an interface – named Locobuffer – to connect the Loconet bus to your computer. In the previous videos, I always used a commercial command station (my Twin-Center) to manage the Loconet…
Today, in the sixth episode of my tutorial about how to control a digital layout with Arduino, let’s learn together how to build Loconet sensors. Sensors are for sure one of the most important elements for an automatic or semi-automatic management of a model railway. Their task is indeed to inform the command station or…
Today, in the fifth episode of my tutorial about controlling a digital model railway with Arduino, let’s learn together how to connect Arduino to the Loconet bus. As the complexity and size of railway models increased, it was soon realized that what the DCC standard offered was not enough. In order to manage throttles, computers,…
One of the most interesting features of the esp32-s2 chip by Espressif is the presence of an USB OTG (USB On-The-Go) interface. Thanks to this interface – and the use of the TinyUSB library – it’s possible to program the chip to act as a USB peripheral. In a video on my Youtube channel I…
The Arduino core for the esp32 chip includes two libraries to communicate with SD cards: The reason is because – as explained in the datasheet – the esp32 chip features a SD/SDIO/MMC host controller, in addition to the “generic” SPI one. If you include in your sketch the SD_MMC library, you’ll use that dedicated host…
Last week I published the project of a dynamic map of Italy, with an RGB LED for each Italian region. To demonstrate how it works, I developed an Arduino program to view the number of new Covid19 cases, retrieving the data from the official civil protection repository. To make the project a little more positive,…