Rob Paisley has a page of model railroad circuitry, including, most interestingly to me, a driver for stepper motors. You’d use stuff like this if you wanted to have people moving around inside your buildings, or if you wanted other moving parts on your layout.
I used to build electronic circuits, when I was a sophomore and junior in high school. It’s been so long now that I don’t even remember what all of the symbols mean. It’s almost sad.
But the good news for me is that I’ll be able to build all kinds of cool stuff once I figure it out. I’ve got lots of old 5.25-inch floppy drives in my basement, with stepper motors ripe for harvesting. A stash of 5.25-inch floppy drives with amber LEDs would be a railroad scratchbuilder’s dream, wouldn’t it?
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.
Now I know where all the 5.25″ floppy drives went… ;^D
Dave,
I have worked with steppers for a few years and been involved in electronic designs for them as well. I have worked with various stepper motor companies in Japan, USA, Switzerland and Germany. If you have any questions then please post them or send me a note 🙂
/David T.
I imagine I’ll take you up on that sooner or later. Thanks. 🙂
My brother, who makes motor controls for industrial machines, made a controller for a cable car my dad set up on his layout. A photodetector at each station would sense the car and the controller would pause a few seconds and then send the car back to the other station. He used LED’s for diodes so there were flashing lights in the station power house–kind of mad scientist effect. 🙂