Tinkerforge Motor Driver

There is a nice mikrocontroller kit system available, see tinkerforge.com . Just connect the bricks and begin to program your application! No need to have a soldering iron…

There are lots of sensors and also IO-boards (named “bricklets”) – however there was no bricklet which can control 4 tortoise turnout motors “out of the box”.

I now made such a board, based on the IO4-bricklet with 2x LB1909MC as +/-12V drivers for the motors. Here is an image of the 35x35mm “IO4-12Volt” Bricklet:
	The test setup with a master brick, an RS485 brick, the new “tinker-tortiose” bricklet and a turnout motor:

Schematics: (for the software the module is identical to the IO-4 Bricklet )

Using this bricklet with JAVA
If you connect to a RaspberryPI (and with “raspian”OS ), you must first

install the pm-utils:
```
sudo apt-get install pm-utils
```
download the brick-deamon and install it with
```
sudo dpkg -i brickd-2.1.0_armhf.deb
```
download the Tinkerforge java-lib (Tinkerforge.jar), store for example in /opt/javalib
for additional info see this link: Java and Tinkerforge

finally compile and run the following test program (change UIDs to your UIDs, make sure that Tinkerforge.jar can be found on classpath etc.). This test program switches a turnout at port 1 in one direction and after 5 seconds in the other direction.

import com.tinkerforge.BrickMaster;
import com.tinkerforge.IPConnection;
import com.tinkerforge.BrickletIO4;

public class JLPITinkerMain {
	
    private static final String HOST = "localhost";
    private static final int PORT = 4223;
    // master brick UID 6qAdgK
    // wdec UID         mb84w
    private static final String MASTER_UID = "6qAdgK"; 
    private static final String WDEC84_UID = "mb84w";
    
    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception{
		
      IPConnection ipcon = new IPConnection(); // Create IP connection
      BrickMaster master = new BrickMaster(MASTER_UID, ipcon); // Create device object
      BrickletIO4 wdec84 = new BrickletIO4(WDEC84_UID, ipcon); // Create device object
	     
      ipcon.connect(HOST, PORT); // Connect to brickd
          // Don't use device before ipcon is connected
	     
      // Set pin 1 output high
      wdec84.setConfiguration((short)(1 << 1), 'o', true);
	     
      // wait 5 seconds
      Thread.sleep(5000);
	     
      // Set pin 1 output low
      wdec84.setValue((short) 0);
	        
      System.out.println("press key to exit");
	     
      System.console().readLine();
      ipcon.disconnect();
	        
      }

}

To control tinkerforge modules via “Lanbahn” UDP Multicast pakets, I have written some small java programs which you find on: sourceforge – project Lanbahn, directory tinker

“work in progress”: a compact 4-channel “train-on-track-indicator” (with galvanic isolation via optocouplers) for the Tinkerforge System. The blue connector is for ISP programming of an ATtiny84.