New Member Introduction - Jim Swann

Greetings from Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. Thanks for allowing me to join the forum.

I am a 72 year old , retired emergency physician. I have recently become interested in microcontrollers and that interest led me to this site on UTUBE. There has been great teaching available there from Bill and the site offers other resources that will likely be helpful.

I have been working for 7-8 years on my latest iteration of an HO gauge model railroad in my basement. It is a big project and will never be "finished". The setup now has 1800 feet of track, several hundred hand-built switches  and is computer monitored and operated using a Digitrax* system infrastructure and JMRI. My grandkids think it is wonderful which makes it all worth the work.

I am exploring how I might use Arduinos (or similar) to enhance the the train operations. My first tasks have been to self educate regarding how these amazing microcontrollers (and all the bits that can be attached to them!) do their thing and how to "successfully"  program the devices. Still a novice I'm afraid...but getting steadily better! It is interesting to me that many of the "expensive" electronic items (from Digitrax and others) are probably quite simplistic microcontroller projects  that one  could easily build/replicate on the workbench with a little planning.

I look forward to learning from folks on this site. I will probably ask some dumb questions...so I'll beg forgiveness in advance. I also will look forward to reading about some of the neat projects folks are working on in their spare moments.

Cheers for now,

Jim Swann