Homemade conventional control throttle Or a homemade DCS system or TMC

I've toyed with the idea of either using a Sewing Machine foot Pedal or a slot car controller to give my son more control of the train, and of course if it goes south, taking your foot/hand off would kill power to it immediately. You could set the main transformer to however many volts and really fine tune operation.

Maybe this winter when I have some time...

  Some years back I built a hand held throttle that could be moved from station to station without stopping the train.

Check out the MRC AH101 HERE.

I'm currently working on a couple things related to this, but don't have anything fully finished.  

I'm unsure what options already exist on the market but a TMCC cab 1 remote and an original Powermaster would get the job done for remote control of conventional engines.  ( or a cab 1L base and remote and a legacy powermaster)

For the home-brew end one could likely mimic this functionality if they wanted to, but it probably isn't worth the trouble for anyone that doesn't enjoy tinkering with electronics.  For those that do like such tinkering, read on.  

While one could scratch build a circuit specifically for this, my approach would be to use inexpensive ($2.50) Arduino microcontrollers to handle the 'heavy lifting'.  One could build a system with a hand-held remote similar to the LionChief remotes that would control track voltage, whistle, and bell functions with about $20 in parts.  There are a couple tricky bits to do this, such as properly detecting zero-crossing for the voltage adjustment, but over all, it is not very hard to make a wireless remote system.  

What I have in mind may not work with early QSI/Proto1 engines, as the track power would have a so-called 'chopped waveform'  If one wanted, however, you could actually attach a servo directly to the throttle on an old transformer and have a pure sine wave output.  It's a kludged solution, but actually a very simple, if inelegant way to do things.  

Anyway, I'd be happy to go into the details of how to build something if needed, but not much point in going to the trouble if it's not needed.  

JGL

I have several of the AH101's ADCX ROB posted above. I can recommend them as well. 

Ditto on the AH101, I picked up one for under $100 years ago.  Lots of power and because I was operating conventional at the time I created 3 plug in locations around the basement.  They worked great.  If you look these are a great value compared to some other transformers of similar wattage.  One warning, I recently learned, early MTH stuff doesn't play well with this power source.  All others however work just fine.

I have a MRC 270watt dual power unit that uses two hard wired remotes to power two variable voltage AC circuits independently. Works fine.  If you want simple wireless RC, I published a design in 2011. A video of it running is available in LCCA's video list.

Funny, I was going to post the same topic just now.  I have a MTH train that is total crap now and I was thinking about using a Ardunio to make a motor controller and train controller.  I was wondering if anyone else has completed this in the past.  I had found some hacks for interacting with the TIU, but I did not get into yet due to life getting in the way.  I was hoping doing a simple train control would be simpler.  

The question I have is if anyone has hacked the MTH tachometer?  This would be key to using the standard motor with PWM.  Otherwise finding a stepper motor to slot in would be better for managing speed.

I was thinking of using a Adafruit Arduino Feather with WIFI and a Adafruit motor board.  With PWM, inputs for reading speed, and abiltiy to turn on and off lights, I think it could be an ideal platform.

Bill

The MTH tach is pretty simple, I use a similar sensor on my Chuff-Generator. 

My choice would probably to do it with a stepper motor if I had a choice, but since the mechanical aspects of mounting the motor, etc. are already solved with standard motors, I'd probably consider the tach sensor and PWM drive.