Office Railway

I thought I'd begin uploading footage from our office railway that recently had to be completely dismantled due to the necessity of a change of premises. This obviously is a great pity, so I thought I would share this with the world. This video shows a steam carriage with beer wagon, but there are several other locomotives which obey their various timetables. The whole system is controlled from an ePC running linux, the scripting language used is Python. Points changing is managed by CDUs controlled by darlington arrays, and on track sensing is via fibre optic phototransistors connected to a robust IO system. Motor control is via an MD22 + Basic Atom processor (the Atom sends pulsout commands to the MD22, received from the ePC). We ended up lighting the display because in the winter the fibre optics need a little extra illumination. For some reason, we had to isolate the two powered sections of track using a relay, even though manual control didn't lead to any overload problems - presumably this must be a PWM issue. We had a lot of fun building this.

Category:

Entertainment

Tags:

• Beat
• this
• James
• May;Having
• fun
• at
• work;model
• railways

[slywy]

What a shame!