Speed,
The generic NodeMcu is very impressive, and I will definitely be trying some out. Thanks for the tip. However, the typical Ebay price I saw was in the high $3+.? Plus of course the cost of the other end adds up to a $4 -$8 additional overhead for a dedicated per turnout connection. That's not particularly? competitive to a twisted pair carrying +/- 12V.
Unless I've missed something, a wireless TCP/IP net is not IP address selective. So the adjacent layouts could be connected by default at the packet level. Given that the larger? train shows in Europe can have 40 or so layouts, and that many small local shows happening most weekends have half a dozen from a selection of possibly thousands nationally. That implies to me that somewhere, there is going to have to be some kind of authoritative "national registry" of unique "Layout XXXXXX" names. Much like Enet Mac addresses are issued to manufacturers.
I'm still not convinced that a 2-way only turnout is the "fundamental particle" That all other track route changing configurations are made of. ;)?? I have to think some more about traversers and the additional time and length limitations they impose. Gantletts and Multi-track grade crossings are also somewhat challenging in that they are affected by another block's occupancy.
Andy
On 1/4/2019 12:37 PM, Speed wrote:
Andy,
There are no dumb questions!
When you look at the 3-way turnout's hardware itself, there are 2 sets of switch points and they need to move, Thrown or Closed. 2 Tortoises, 2 servos, 2 manual gadgets or 2 something elses. So, yes, in JMRI it is currently done with 2 turnouts. Fairly easy to use Routes in JMRI to control the thrown and close of the needed turnouts to get you to the 1st, 2nd or 3rd path by activating a sensor. So, if we put Routes in MQTT, then the relevant subscribers could be told to do something when topic DFW/clublayout/module001/yardladder/route gets a message like "3".
MQTT is not a wireless protocol, TCP/IP is all you need. It became very popular with IOT devices, and that gave it the wireless flavor. The fear about the adjacent layouts being controlled by the same MQTT subscription will need to be just as you would if they were DCC controlled accessories on the same command station. If two modules both use the same DCC address (example #145) for a turnout, both will move. For an MQTT implementation, DFW/clublayout/module001/turnout002 would not interfere with DFW/clublayout/module006/turnout002 or myownlayout/module001/turnout002, if they where to connect to the same MQTT broker. And then of course, JMRI would also need to have all the turnouts in the same table, and thus unique as well. (One of the smart things in LCC/OpenLCB is the 64-bit addressing that would help keep all LCC devices on the planet unique.)
Back to the wired versus wireless question, with a NodeMcu now costing $1.25 <>, I do not know how a "wired" Ethernet implementation would beat that! Noise is a good topic, but not for this thread, this is MQTT in JMRI, and not a "wireless" thread.
Speed
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