General electronics and or robots

[TrippiN]

Welcome TrippiN

Have been into trains from 4 or 5 years old, been working(playing) with computers since 1982 ish still have my first two computers Ti- 994a and an Apple IIc. Took an interest in electrical/electronics in 9th grade by junior year in high school I enrolled in a vocational school for junior and senior year spent half day at high school and the other half at a vocational school in a course called digital/industrial electronics. After high school went right into DeVry to earn an Assoc. degree of applied science of electronics 1990 then went back 2006 online to get a B.S. technical management. I have about 13 years experience working on electronics mostly industrial controls, 2 wire and 4 wire loop systems. Also have worked on cable tv, medical, and phone equipment and 5 years digital copiers Now I work outside my field and mostly "play" electronics now and then, I have been interested in robotics and laser technology but have not got around to doing anything yet. Microcontrollers are neat used to the pic series of microcontrollers at work.

I noticed that TI is getting into field of Ardunio type boards, I have a little bit experience in C and C++ how similar is programming an ardunio ? I have not jumped into this part of the hobby yet.

Hello and thanks for the welcome. Arduino is very C++ ish... It would have been all C++ but in order to simplify the use for a broad demographic a few rules were broken. The upside is that Arduinos are very very easy to use with tens of millions of free lines of code on the web. Trust me, if a model RRer wants to do it, the robot guys have done it already. In this line of thought a train is a very simple robot with no uncontrollable variables. It on a track with fixed locations. We routinely deal with robots that navigate real world variables.

I am currently involved in a project that, with a boxcar of luck, will send a 8 foot robotic boat across the atlantic late this year.

A final thought on Arduino. I was a holdout and wouldn't adopt Arduino for the longest time. Die hard Pic guy.... The simplicity and worldwide support got me. Is it the end all be all controller? hell no. Is it simple to use and offer the abilities we RRers need,want? Yes, and then some.

Ted