Planet Arduino

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.

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.

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.

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.

[Mario] can take his train set on the road with him because he build the thing inside of a suitcase. That in itself is pretty neat, but he pulled off more than just laying down a ring of track and surrounding it with realistic scenery. This train set is automated.

The suitcase itself looks a bit funny and that’s because it started as a portable phonograph. Removing the turntable and it’s requisite parts made plenty of room for the N-scale railroad (that’s really small stuff!). An Arduino with a motor shield drives the train around the loop. A reed sensor below a section of track provides feedback on where the locomotive is in the circuit. When it reaches that point the train stops and a bridge is lowered over the track for some invisible traffic to cross. There is even some audio flair which can be heard in the video after the break. It includes the whistle of the train and the ding of that bell mounted on the top half of the case.