So I’m realizing that I’m way to stuck on long form posts and need to get in to the habbit of just posting anytime I have an update. Otherwise I get caught up in being to busy and just don’t post at all… for months lol. So here goes short form!

I’ve always wanted to have a web based interfaced for many of my projects and lately I’ve finally come around to teaching myself web programming. My platform of choice is the Beaglebone Black. I’m writing the server side in Python with a module called Flask that acts as a web host for the web page portion. On the web front I’ve been learning all the necessary components for that. Namely HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. That’s four languages to learn all in one go! Its a lot but the web languages especially are so ubiquitous that its not bad to pick up. When its all said and done I should good code base for future projects that I can use to create web interfaces! Then just about every device with a web browser suddenly becomes a remote control.

I’m building towards making a nice looking web interface for my laminar fountains but my learning project is to build a simple controller for a Model Railroad. Eventually it will consist of a single motor controller for power and a few relays/triacs for switch control. My father recently pulled his N scale model train layout out from storage after nearly two decades and I thought it would be fun to build him a controls upgrade.

If you want to follow my experimentation you can find my code on Github here: https://github.com/IkeHayes/Railroad_Control