Model Railroad DCC?

JoeA

Has anyone tried usingParallax microcontrollers for model railroad Digital Command Control (DCC)? Or any model railroad signalling/control for that matter?
I'd assume you would need to drive some higher-power gates or relays to control a few amps at 12-18 volts.

JoeA

uxorious

I have always wondered that as well since the potential for "automation" on a model railroad layout is phenomenal. I once asked a few guys at a local model railroad store about what ideas they had. The one thing that sticks in my mind is a way to ID a train and the cars attached to it for a switch list. This woudl be a list of car numbers that they use to simulate loading and unloading cars on a train for going to separte locations. I actually bought 3 color sensors, reed switches, some magnets and made some color band stickers to try it out. The sticker would be on the bottom of the cars and would ID the cars just like resistor color code. IE: Car 421 would have a sticker with Yellow, Red, and Brown blocks of color. Unfortunately, that's as far as I went because I jumped to other ideas that seemed more fun.

If I ever free time to play with my N scale layout, I would have a number of things being controlled by Stamps. My dream would be to have an autonomous layout that controls the speed and direction of trains, switches, crossing signals, and automatic couplers/decouplers. Sensors on the track would determine position, speed, and direction of each car adn would log the activity. Sounds like a lot, but it's all really simple. I just don't think the market is there for more automation in model railroading than DCC right now. With all the new tiny sensors available (compass, G, etc) you could make a pretty smart loco that feeds this data through a wireless link.

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~~ dRu ~~

RDL2004

www.parallax.com/html_pages/resources/custapps/app_railroad.asp

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- Rick

Timothy D. Swieter

In the Propeller Object Exchange there is an object for generating DCC packets. I haven't used it, but I want to someday. There were also a couple threads on the propeller forum for creating some DCC equipment using the propeller but the project never got rolling (pun intended).

Automating a layout would be great fun! You could setup a few routine trains that are computer controlled while you manuall control another train. The system can react appropriately with signaling, track switches, etc. There are always more ideas than time or money.

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Timothy D. Swieter
tdswieter.com

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One little spark of imagination is all it takes for an idea to explode