Schlagwort: Model Trains

  • The ultimate lighting system for model railroaders

    The ultimate lighting system for model railroaders

    Reading Time: 2 minutes

    Go to any model railroading convention and you’ll see that most layouts have far more work put into the terrain and buildings than into the trains themselves. The emphasis is usually on realism, so enthusiasts spend uncountable hours constructing and weathering their buildings. But lighting those buildings can be difficult, leading many people choose simple static lighting. This project by Olivier Wagener makes it relatively easy to upgrade that lighting to something much more sophisticated.

    Wagener started this project to help his father improve the lighting of a train station building for his model railroad. The result is really impressive, because every room in the building has two of its own LEDs: one a warm temperature and one a cool temperature. This also supports RGB LEDs. Using a smartphone, the user can set the brightness, color, and temperature of each room individually. They can also group those into zones for quick control. Once setup, the user has complete control over the realistic lighting and that adds a whole new dimension to model railroading.

    This is possible thanks to an Arduino MKR 1010 WiFi board that communicates with Wagener’s custom app over the local network. This can handle up to 976 single-color LEDs (warm or cool), 305 RGB LEDs, or some combination of the two. To give the Arduino full PWM (pulse-width modulation) control over that many LEDs, Wagener chose PCA9685 PWM module boards. Each one has 16 channels, so a full set of 976 single-color LEDs will require 61 boards. 305 RGB LEDs will also require 61 boards, because each of those LEDs takes up three channels.

    [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVVxhGMEgmw?feature=oembed&w=500&h=281]

    If you want to use Wagener’s project in your own buildings, all of the code and information is available on his Gitlab page. 

    The post The ultimate lighting system for model railroaders appeared first on Arduino Blog.

    Website: LINK

  • Controlling a model railroad with a vintage Atari ST

    Controlling a model railroad with a vintage Atari ST

    Reading Time: 2 minutes

    Back in the ’90s, Cyril Rossignol had a dream of controlling his model railroad with his computer. While that was possible at the time, it wasn’t easy and would have required some serious skill with hardware and programming. But today, thanks to development boards like those from Arduino, this is a much more accessible project. That’s how Rossignol was able to achieve his dream and control a model railroad with a vintage Atari ST.

    The Atari ST line of computers hit the market in the mid 1980s and featured mouse-controlled GUIs (graphical user interfaces). Rossignol recently found his vintage Atari 1040 STE while sorting through old belongings and realized that he could accomplish his dream from the ’90s using an Arduino as an intermediary between the computer and the model railroad. With a custom software interface programmed for the Atari, Rossignol was able to control his model locomotives from his computer.

    Rossignol’s model railroad features DCC (Digital Command Control), which controls the amount of power and its polarity going to the tracks, as well as switches. Rossignol just needed a way for his Atari to communicate with the DCC. For that, he chose an Arduino Mega 2560 board. The Atari talks to the Arduino via an RS232-to-TTL converter, and the Arduino, in turn, talks to Rossignol’s DCC-EX via I2C.

    This setup was a success and now Rossignol can operate his trains with his Atari, just like he envisioned 30 years ago.

    The post Controlling a model railroad with a vintage Atari ST appeared first on Arduino Blog.

    Website: LINK

  • Raspberry Pi Pico-controlled model railroad

    Raspberry Pi Pico-controlled model railroad

    Reading Time: 2 minutes

    The Orient Express. The Flying Scotsman. Ivor the Engine. All juggernauts of the rail community, but none powered by our microcontroller and all, thus, inferior in our eyes. Raspberry Pi Pico has been used in cooler and more interesting ways every day since its launch in January this year, but this is the first time we’ve seen it powering a miniature railway. KushagraK7 shared this compact application on Instructables, and we ended up down a rabbit hole of model trains enthusiasm.

    [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmVAtyxU01Q?start=9&feature=oembed&w=500&h=281]

    The Motor Channel on YouTube is a great community for miniature railway enthusiasts

    What does Raspberry Pi Pico do here?

    KushagraK7’s Raspberry Pi Pico controls the track voltage to control the speed of the train using pulse-width modulation (PWM). PWM is a method of reducing the average power delivered by an electrical signal. A motor driver powers the locomotive itself.

    You gotta speed it up and then you gotta slow it down

    This particular setup is designed to make the train start off slowly then speed up gradually each time it travels over a sensored segment of the track — that is, a segment equipped with an infrared sensor to detect whether a train is there. A therapeutic loop of the speeding-up process plays from this point in KushagraK7’s YouTube video.

    sensored parts of train track
    The ‘sensored’ part of the train track ready to be connected

    Once the train reaches its top speed, it slows down again, coming to a complete halt after it passes the sensored track section once more. The train stops for a set amount of time, then starts up again. Fast, faster, slow, stop. Fast, faster, slow, stop. And on and on and on again. All without any human interaction needed – you can just watch. Super satisfying.

    Hardware

    [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HqcdEgkYbN8?feature=oembed&w=500&h=281]

    Learn how to make a low-cost sensored track “in minutes” with this previous Instructable from the maker

    How do I build it?

    KushagraK7 has created an illustrated step-by-step tutorial for other miniature railway enthusiasts to follow, including when you should tidy up your wires, plus ideas to tinker with the code to adjust speed and stopping patterns.

    Point us to your Raspberry Pi-powered model railway projects in the comments. Choo choooooooo.

    Website: LINK

  • Real-time train station departure board

    Real-time train station departure board

    Reading Time: 2 minutes

    All across the UK, you’ll find train departure boards on station platforms that look like this:

    They’ve looked this way for as long as I can remember (before they were digital dot-matrix displays, they were made from those flappy bits of plastic with letters of the alphabet and numbers printed on them, which whirled round like a Rolodex; they still look very similar). If you’re a frequent train traveller in the UK, you probably have a weird emotional response to seeing one of these. Mine is largely one of panic about being late.

    Some people have a more…benign relationship with trains than I do, like Chris Crocker-White, who has adapted a build tweeted by Chris Hutchinson to make a miniature departure board for his desk. Here’s the tweet that started it all:

    Chris Hutchinson on Twitter

    Pretty hyped about my most recent @Raspberry_Pi project – a realistic, real-time, train departure board I’ve open sourced the software over at: https://t.co/vGQzagsSpi Next step: find a case and make it a permanent fixture! https://t.co/HEXgzdH8TS

    Chris C-W’s build is similar, but has a couple of very neat upgrades, including some back-end software work (his build runs in Docker on balenaCloud, to make configuration easier), and some work on the display, which he’s tweaked to use 1:1 pixel mapping of the fonts and avoid any scaling, so the tiny board looks more like the dot-matrix LED displays you’ll see when you visit the station. You can see the difference in the image below:

    Chris seems to be using his board as a piece of desktop furniture, where it looks terrific, but model train or narrow-gauge enthusiasts should be all over this project too; it’s a lovely way to inject some realism into a miniature setup. You can find a very complete guide to making your own here.

    Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a train to catch.

    Website: LINK

  • Control model trains wirelessly with your smartphone

    Control model trains wirelessly with your smartphone

    Reading Time: < 1 minute

    Control model trains wirelessly with your smartphone

    Arduino Team — January 2nd, 2019

    Model trains have been a staple of DIY hobbiysts for generations, and while wireless control options can be purchased, KushagraK7’s hack lets you use your phone instead.

    The setup consists of an Arduino Uno, along with a motor driver shield to vary the trains’s peed and direction, as well as flip turnouts to allow for different sections of track to be used.

    The system employs a novel interface system, where an off-the-shelf Bluetooth receiver passes DTMF (telephone dial tones) to a decoder board, which then sends this decoded data on to the Arduino. While some might opt for an HC-05 Bluetooth module or similar, this enables control with a standard tone generator app, and the phone could even be physically connected via a stereo cable if convenient.

    [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5J_W7DCo_o?feature=oembed&w=500&h=281]

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    Website: LINK