Any engineers out there? (Not locomotive Drivers)

What kind of ideas are they?

Why don't you share them directly with a manufacturer like Lionel or MTH where they have the skills to assess the R&D costs, the production costs, etc., and can do a market study to see if it makes sense to bring it to life.

The worst they can say is no...at best they will ask you for permission to use your idea and make it happen or at least do some R&D on the feasibility.

In the past, I have given direct feedback to Lionel and MTH on various ideas that I like to think in some far off remote way may have sparked by me (and most probably others with similar ideas unbeknownst to me)--all in the name of making our hobby more enjoyable and of course some profit for the company that brings it to us first.

I would just share them here, with everyone.  There is a monstrous body of knowledge here.  Someone might know if any of them were ever invented/built by some company in the past, or have ideas, or maybe someone here did build one him/herself.  

A few comments.....

First and foremost, do not send your ideas to the manufacturers.  You will probably get a letter reading something like:  "Your product idea is being returned unopened or unreviewed. We do not accept unsolicited design ideas."  Strange as this sounds, an unsolicited idea that resembles a manufacturer's  current R&D project can cause headaches for the manufacturer legally, especially during the patent process.

As Lee suggested, you might consider sharing your ideas with the forum members; there are many engineers including ones that have designed for the major manufacturers. 

Regards,

Lou N

This is as best as I can do condensing this idea so please bare with me.

This would be the first of its kind.  A donut shop with a police car parked in front of it.  A bank with a getaway car or bank robbers holding bags of cash; the scenario is as follows.

Bank alarm goes off at the push of a button

Police radio call comes in “whatever code it is for a bank robbery”

Police reply Adam 12  in route

Police car backs up out of the donut shop and lays simulated smoking rubber. (I am sure Megasteam can make rubber smelling smoke.)

Bank robbers exit the bank saying “Move it the cops are coming”

If it is a car in front of the bank it burns rubber too and takes off like the MTH Diner, Gas Station, and car wash.

The bank robbers could come out and make their way to the car and disappear into the side walk when they get close.  A two way spring loaded door allows them to disappear and come back out for resetting.

You would be able to use them together or separately 

I am not sure if MTH has a patented on the animation part of their accessories or not.  It sounds complex but a good engineer can figure it out.  I have names of the structures and I have drawn stick figures and very bad concept art for the buildins.

 I normally would keep this too myself but friends encouraged me to share.

Interesting . . . rather more complicated than any accessories I've seen, which do just one thing (cattle come out, go around, go back in, etc., logs load or unload).  You could do it with Arduino controls I suppose.

These accessories could be daisy chained and be plug and play.  Can you imagine one button activating multiple accessories at once?  Lionel has new plug and play accessories although different they do away with a lot of wires. Peeling rubber would be done with a fan driven smoke in the structure with rollers added to spin the wheels.

It would take a lot more development of the idea before an engineer would need to get involved, although a creative one might help with some of that.  The idea needs to be framed out as to how it would work, etc..  This is a complicated animation, with two different buildings, action in both of them, and a car (smoking tires), etc.  Note that puts it in a different leauge with nearly all accessories, which are a simgle building/thing and that do just one thing.  

It would take a lot of work to work it out, design, and engineer.  It would be pretty expensive and have limited appeal (size and topic).  I'm not sure any major manufacturer would go for it.  You could simplify it to a bank-robber bank building: alrms go off, the robbers come out the doors toward a getaway car at the curb (sound of starter and a motor not starting), a police car comes around the corner, comes to a halt (screeching tire sound), door opens, cop gets out pointing a gun, robbers drop the bag of money and raise their hands.  Now its just one building, one (long, complicated) animation.  That might be both easier to make, more appealing in the market, and easier to sell to a manufacturer.  

One would need to figure out a lot of details first.  In general, the manufacturers won't do that: they have their own ideas that consume all the development time they have.  

I wish you luck with it though.  

The type of sequential animation you described is what servomechanisms do best. Sounds like a set of servos driven by an Arduino programmed multi servo driver would work. This is a very complicated process and the required parts could be costly, but it is a cute idea.

Just think, you could build this for your layout, you'd have one of a kind!

I know the details of how it should work but I don't know how to build it.  The accessories would be no more complicated than what MTH already has. I believe that it would be a timing issue as the first accessory would have to trigger the second one. It would be like hitting the activation button on the MTH gas station and shortly after that the fire department gets activated.  I do have a couple of diagrams that I have drawn out of how it would work to include the smoking tires. I do imagine it takes a lot of engineering to figure this out and a lot of money that is why we have not had very many new accessories come out from any of the manufactures.  What would you rather pay 200.00 for an accessory that is only capable of doing one thing or building a city that could actually function without beating the poor guy (me) up with complicated wiring.  I know it's a pipe dream but maybe it's the kick in the pants that could attract more young people.

Thinking about it more, it seems too complicated to ever be a standard product - like I said simplify it to one building and maybe . . . 

But more to Gunrunnerjohn's point, think about this.  Everyone on this forum who knows who to build things like this learned by doing.  Maybe they had a teacher (my dad in my case) but most of what they learned they simply picked up by trying, learning from doing.  Just jump in and try.  It will be fun, you will learn, and eventually you would get it done and have something unique.  Case in point: it took three years and four attempts before I got my moving-ski-boat-on-lake animation to work.

Take some time and reconsider all of the activity.  Use light and sound to create illusions.  Donut shops now have drive thrus.  Have the police car waiting at the window, thus no figures are involved.  Have a getaway car in front of the bank.  Have a canopy in front of the bank door so once again you do not need to see figures, only hear them.  Use a sound chip with dialog relating to a stick up and gunfire.  the getaway car takes off heading down a road that goes behind a large building.  Next you hear the police radio call.  Then the police car takes off from the drive thru and heads down behind the same large building.  then the sound chip delivers a police warning and gunfire.  Enhance the activity with a red flashing LED on the police car and a white flashing LED to simulate gunfire.

Regards,

Lou N

The trick will be synchronizing the "gunfire" flashes with the sounds.

Can do.  Many  of the sound IC's have additional I/O besides the audio out.

Lou N

I'm sure it's possible...

If you use a $1 MP3 player module off eBay to store the sound, these are STEREO devices.  So you put the animation sound track on the left channel which drives a speaker, and embed a burst on the right channel that drives the LED.  Nothing says the audio tracks has to represent sound driving a speaker.  Of course this basic concept is how animatronics works at Disneyland - multi-track "recordings" where some tracks represent audio and other tracks drive mechanical animations synchronized to the audio.  The non-audio track could be encoded in a way that one type of burst flashes the lights, while another burst activates the smoke generator for the burning rubber when the synchronized sound plays on the audio track.

If I were going to make this, I would not go into it worrying about the timing of flashes, gunfire sounds, etc., as much as about making all the motion smooth.  My experience with small animations like this is that getting the robbers or the cops to move smoothly and at a "natural" speed - i.e, to come out the door of the bank, or the bad raise their hands evenly and not jerkily, etc., or step out of the car and raise an arm pointing a gun, can be rather challenging: hard to make good, smooth and quiet equipment that fits down underneath without using more space than you have.  I've tended to use great big motors with massive flywheels to help stabilize speeds and all, but it still often takes until version three before it works smoothly.

It would be a fun project, and more fun yet to do without any electronics - time and drive it all with cams and such.    Still, I'll watch while someone else does it.  Too many other projects waiting to add another to the list.  

I picked up five of these, they were only $5.59, and I figured they might be useful for some simple animation.  I'm thinking more along the lines of the engineer turning his head in a cab, not something this complex.

I didn't think of a drive through donut shop as the one I have it modeled after is a drive through.  This is indeed too complicated to make working prototypes as an individual.  The folks that created the MTH operating accessories could probably work this out in a short time.  If I were a rich man and I'm not this would have been made a couple of years ago.

Suppose one day this was actually released would anyone hear by them if they could add them one at a time and then have the all interact after you have laid out your town.