OpenIoT & ELC 2016

"Remove poisonous spiders before accessing main board." This is just one of
the lessons learned while working on the Orange Empire Railroad Museum signal
garden. Other lessons concern how to deal with birds nests, and other
surprises.

Technical problems include the fact that some railroad signals have
very big magnets which are turned off and on, generating pulses that fry
input circuits. There are other difficulties that occur when trying to
connect 100 year old equipment to a modern computer system.

The talk not only covers surprises like spiders, but also practical
concerns such as isolating circuits to prevent noise spikes from
damaging equipment, using flyback diodes to eliminate the pulses that
occur when the relay is turned off.

This paper covers the many practical, real world challenges you have when marrying 100 year old
technology to modern computers.