I'm actually in the (part-time) process of fitting driving cameras to trolley cabs that operate in real-time. Unfortunately, effort wise, for HO in my case,? that involves some time consuming micro metal work as well as the usual electronics. But I have to bypass most of the DCC features to get the signals back to the driver consoles.
The tough trick is then to get a non-human driven "smart" trolley to figure out it's own position based on its route history and what it can see/sense out front. Probably some collaboration with a central system using RPS and/or layout overview cameras is the way to go. But definitely not just traditional block detection. I'm thinking (backwards?) more along the lines of key positions having passive transmitters that identify their specific location code to the trolley, rather than dumb sensors that try to identify the presence of a trolley in on of very many, very short blocks . That way the length and quantity of "blocks" becomes a non-issue. And the trolley itself sends that info to the central system, as needed, rather than the location sending it.
And did I mention it all has to be cheap ;)
Andy
?On 8/19/2018 10:50 AM, Bob Jacobsen wrote:
This kind of operation might require thinking outside the blocks.
I’ve had small parts in the work on two different non-blocked systems for locating model-railroad rolling stock.
*) One was RPS (), which even had some JMRI support (). It used ultrasound transmitters attached to DCC decoders for location. It worked, but it required hardware on engines and cabooses, and at the time was too expensive to be popular.
*) The other, more recent one used a couple of RPi’s with high-def video cameras looking at the layout to locate trains. Stable alignment was achieved through a couple of IR LEDs (visible to the cameras, not to people) buried on the layout. It basically worked, even separating trains on adjacent tracks in yards (which can be tricky because of shadows), although getting good coverage would have required more cameras because of poor layout sight-lines. Then it went sideways as my collaborators wanted to use IR LEDs to uniquely identify engines: More engine-by-engine hardware, etc.
Neither of those projects really worked out, but either method might work with some real attention. Or there might be even better ideas!
Bob
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