I purchased a Bluetooth module to attach to the Arduino today. I connected the leads from it GND – GND, 3.3V – 3.3V, RX – TX, TX – RX. I got the little flashing red light happening on the Bluetooth module, but no communications. In fact, it kept locking up the program which was a bit of a nuisance.
Ah well! The best laid plans of mice and men as they say… I screwed the Ardui-Motor to the table so I could make safer semi-permanent connections and got the locomotives moving again. This time, I also connected DCC power and set the jumper on the Octocoder and got the turnouts running under computer control! Unfortunately I have 11 turnouts and the Octopus3 will only run 8 of them at a time, so I’ll eventually have to get another Octopus3 to complete the setup. That’s ok because I plan to have an additional 4 turnouts on the layout yet.
This is the DCC++ Controller screen on my PC. I’ve diverged from the codebase pretty substantially.
I’m very still pleased to see that I don’t need an expensive controller to run things. Hooray for Arduino and DCC++ (Thanks Gregg)!