@BillYo414 posted:I still have to get through the thread but I think this is a great idea. I was planning to work on something similar using RFID tags or infrared readers that report back to an Arduino/SBC to move product around the layout. I specifically designed my layout to have destinations. An RFID chip on the car and reader at the station would let me pick up and drop off product (people or freight).
Being able to do this with LCS would be awesome! It's way over my head but that's never stopped me before. I'm going to finish reading the thread tonight and tomorrow but I think this is a great idea and would bring waybill/purpose driven operations to a lot of people!
Yeah, the main reason I wanted to try this with nothing but LCS is ease of adoption and wiring. I want to make sure for at least the basic modes of this game you would not need to touch a computer. Just plug this game module into LCS with a PDI cable (the base 3 will have 3 of these PDI ports built in). Maybe the add-on scoreboard can just communicate wirelessly to the game module to keep things simple. The scoreboard can be powered by a type c charger.
The legacy engines already broadcast enough identifying info at all times, and the sensor track IRV2 especially make it pretty reasonable to add up to 4 sensor locations at once. I have full intentions to release both a kit to retrofit IR transmitters to existing engines/rolling stock, along with the info to build one yourself for those who have the desire.
As for the station marker lights, the Raspberry PI Pico W would be a pretty cheap way to wirelessly add station occupancy indicators for this game, and they could technically use track power to run. I would love to create my own TMCC decoder board to just read commands right off the track. But that seems a ways off, my only hope there might be to try and reverse engineer a spare R2LC board I have. An LCS BPC2 Block Power Controller or DIY BPC equivalent module could also be used to drive the station passenger/freight count lights.
The current delay on my side is getting past the hard part, implementing the raw pdi connection interface.
