This is scary. I actually understand what you guys are talking about!
This is an interesting article.
http://tronixstuff.com/2011/08/26/tutorial-maximising-your-arduinos-io-ports/
Mayme something like this on the xmit side, with a 'duino talking to an XBee, and Xbees receiving on the remote side. That cuts down the amount of xbees I would need by half.
That’s a cool part, but why would you need more than 2 xbees?
For the far end. Ill have more than one receive destination separated by distance. Remote nodes, if you will.
I just found this, too. https://www.sparkfun.com/products/11723. I wonder if I could stack two of them?
Personally, I like the 23017 idea, they are only a buck and a half in pdip. Cool chip. Looks like lots of i2c code for AVR out there too. Concentrate the data on the master end, ship it out to each slave, decompose and out to the I/O pins. Sweet.
I2C isn’t hard with avr.
I should probably spin this off into another thread, once I start the Arduino coding. Here’s a block diagram of the components. Purple is phase 2, blue is phase 3.
Yes, please do, I’m interested in where this goes. Pardon my ignorance but why the three openLCB nodes? What is the middle one for? Couldn’t you just make the arduino ‘speak’ OpenLCB?
There will be many OpenLCB nodes, not just 3. I just used 3 to illustrate. The Arduino OpenLCB implementation isnt mature yet, and there are no off-the-shelf shields available for it yet; there are all build-and-modify. Each OpenLCB node has 40 IO pins, so I’ll need multiples of them for the project, and the price point makes them attractive. The Arduino is only there as a collector and TX/RX to the remote nodes.
Do you have links for the openLCB nodes you are looking at and any Ardunio adaptations that may be relevant?
I’m using the 16/24 Producer/Consumer nodes from Tim Hatch (http://www.tchtechnology.com/).
SPCoast’s RailroadShield is the closest Ive found to an off-the-shelf shield. http://www.spcoast.com/wiki/index.php/RailroadShield
Reading this post has me wondering if this will end up on the show “TheBig Bang Theory”!
I dunno Sean, but if he hooks any of that stuff up backwards you may hear a big bang over the horizon 
I’m trying to figure out the advantages of the OpenLCB nodes. They seem overly complex and expensive, plus CAN is wired isn’t it?
Where’s Rooster and his mushroom cloud when we need’em?..
This is a bit off the subject of wireless control – but good nerds are hard to find and this might be a good place to get all of your attention at once. I’m currently experimenting with some animatronic effects (combined motion and sound) for large scale figures to go into the repair shop structure I am building. I have been using the Maestro series of miniature servo controllers from Pololu for the motion, an MP3 Trigger board from Sparkfun for the audio, and a Pololu Baby Orangutan for the controller. Also, a few PIR sensors to activate certain effects based on motion detection. Since the Baby Orangutan is AVR based, I am using Pololu’s free AVR Development Bundle and working in C++ (a first for me.) I would be interested in hearing about anyone else’s experience in this area, or am I just a crazy guy trying to break new ground here?
Bob
Sounds interesting, Bob. I’ve been looking into using Tam Valley decoders and mini servos, myself. Right now I’m just getting into the Arduino.
Hey Bob. Sounds like you are doing some cool stuff. I worked with the Pololu Maestro and the Wixel quite a bit and they are great widgets. But the Wixel just doesn’t have the wireless range I was looking for so I went with the Xbee series 1 modules. I coupled these with an AVR Attiny 1634 micro controller which I program in C. I’m using the AVR USB programmer from Pololu and Atmel Studio 6. I control my servos directly with the Attiny using the 16 bit timer to generate the proper servo pulses so I don’t need the Maestro anymore. Also, the MP3 board from Sparkfun was a bit pricey, so I switched to a module I found at MDFLY, an MP3 player for $10. Here is a quick read of some of this if you are interested:
Martin