Subject:
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Re: Idea for a track power pickup for non motored trains...
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.trains
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Date:
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Thu, 12 Feb 2004 07:59:39 GMT
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Viewed:
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1447 times
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Ben Fleskes wrote:
> In lugnet.trains, Christopher Masi wrote:
> Perhaps somewhere down the road, somebody will figure out a wifi radio control
> unit. Put a battery and receiver in the train and you are done. There are so
> many advantages of not having to wory about connecting power to the track -
> especially when you do complicated layout. A wifi system could have all the
> advantages of DCC, but without the drawback of providing power through the
> rails.
>
> Anyone out there with more wifi experience to know if this could come to be? If
> done a few brief searches on the web and haven't been able to find a wifi based
> radio control unit intended for the hobby market.
Yes, I would be susprised if you'd find anything like this - at least
for a year or two. But I can tell you how I would do it if I were so
inclined:
(Warning, technical dicussion follows)
I'd take a BalloonBoard (http://www.balloonboard.org//) and put a
CompactFlash Wireless card in it (Pretec have a suitable one). The
board runs Linux, so this would give you a TCP/IP connection from
another computer. You'd probably have some kind of very simple UDP
based protocol. The board would then be connected via its
numerous I/O ports to whatever else you wanted to drive.
The actual software implementation is left as an exercise to the reader :-)
The downside? Pretty expensive for a one off ($600 or so by the time
you're done), and involves a fair bit of specialised Linux hacking.
Plus the board perhaps isn't _quite_ small enough when combined with a
CF card, although it'd fit inside a reasonable sized carriage.
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