Well, I've got my hands on a really old device from the railroadcompany where I work, they were about to trow it away.
On bottom of this thread there's a link to pictures to make myself a little bit more clearly.
So the device has:
phone rotary dial (1 piece)
Hookswitch (1 piece)
switches (19 pieces)
"pull"-buttons (3 pieces)
button (1 piece)
each switch has 2 light's (one above the switch, one below the switch) except for one switch, which is broken and has no lights
and each button has 1 light.
lights (42 pieces)
The lights used are t6.8f 24v 4 but that doesn't really matter
(Diam.x Length: 5.9 x 44.5 mm, Volts: 24 V, Amps: 40 mA)
If a picture is needed: link
My idea is to put a beagleboard with Ubuntu 9.10 on it (without gui) and make a mailserver from that device.
Now, my question is, if I buy an arduino, will I be able to use the old switches, the lights, the hookswitch and the rotary dialer on it so it can communicate with the Ubuntu beagleboard?
If so, I would buy an arduino but I'm sure that I need a lot of explonation about this, I'm a railroadman, not a techman ;D
You might want to get that appraised by an antiques dealer in railroad memorbilia before you start hacking it; it might be worth something.
Just because someone throws something away does not necessarily mean it is worthless; I bought an Altair at a local electronics junkyard for $100.00, and had an offer of $900.00 that evening on an Altair user listserv. We've all heard of the individual who purchases a painting at a tag/yard sale for a few dollars and finds out it is worth much more than that.
I advise you to get it appraised, first; if it turns out to be worthless, then hack away at it. If you don't, and it is later learned to be valuable, anything you do to it will likely destroy its value (even refinishing; oh, especially refinishing!)...
It's worth so much. There are only 2 left in Belgium and the other one will go to the railroad museum, which they are building right now. The fact I have this device can be called theft, but noneless, they would have trown this one away because of some small damage to it.
I can't sell the thing and I can't throw it away neither.
Keeping it with me is the only thing that satisfy me because it can have a second life without the outer look beeing changed (except for cleaning here and there).
I, myself work with the railroads, and I've been made crazy about trains since I was a 4 year old kid, so this device is in good hands ith me. And I want to give it a new purpose. A new life.
Well it should be pretty simple to interface with a Arduino. The I/O count is somewhat high, but not something a Arduino Mega can't handle. All the switch inputs could just be wired directly to digital input pins with their internal pull-ups enabled. All the switch common connections could then wire to the Arduino ground pin. The 24 vdc lamps would have to be driven by small switching transistors as the Arduino can't handle that voltage directly.
Sounds like a fun project, but first you will have to define what actions you want the switches to perform.
I can think of some but for every switch? No, that's too much. I will think about this in the train, if there would be only 5 switches, I knew what to do with them
But for a server?
I think if the lamps will work (I can try to put leds there maybe?) then the switches could be made to dial a pre-entered phone number I guess. And some switches for minor things.
Well start simple and in stages. First wire a switch into a digital input pin to prove you can read a change of state on the switch, that will help out proving the wiring to the switch(s). Then work on that rotory dial, it will interface as a single pulsing switch contact, so you will have to write a function that can count the number of pulses into a digit variable and then times out ready for the next digit to be dialed. Then when you decide if you are going to utilize the original 24v lamps or new leds you can work on the output control and wiring for the lights.
Yes, you could use an Arduino, but you don't really need one: the Beagleboard has I2C and SPI interfaces. Since you'd be adding some sort of I/O expanders to the Arduino, you might as well connect them directly.
Since most of those switches are center-off, you'll actually need to treat each of them as two separate switches (e.g., "#12 up" and "#12 down") to properly track their state. I suggest something like the MCP23016 for reading the switches.
The TLC5940 is popular for driving LEDs, and has enough current-handling capacity to drive those 40mA incandescents, too.
You might want to go with an Arduino to handle the rotary dial, though. It depends on whether the Beagleboard has a convenient way of timing the pulses.
