The Randall Museum in San Francisco hosts a large HO-scale model model railroad. Created by the Golden Gate Model Railroad Club starting in 1961, the layout was donated to the Museum in 2015. Since then I have started automatizing trains running on the layout. I am also the model railroad maintainer. This blog describes various updates on the Randall project and I maintain a separate blog for all my electronics not directly related to Randall.
2024-01-09 - Freight & Trolley Automation Updates
Category RandallIt’s time for the regular Freight train to go back to the automation and replace the Polar Express.
The trolley automation is starting to work as promised:
The ESP32 software now communicates with JMRI using MQTT, which gives better response times (down from 1050 ms to 2-6 ms!)
I’ll leave this running as is for a couple more weeks to see if I got all the issues figured out. I may want to slightly adjust the timing of the trolley, for example.
The next step after is to finalize the sensor installation: first I’ll change the ESP32 for one without the OLED display (the display is very useful for debugging, but useless after since nobody will be looking at it), then I need to add a couple LEDs to display an ok/failure status (since there won’t be any screen anymore), and finally the goal is to mount the sensor next to the track, probably hidden by a building, while the ESP32 should be mounted below the layout. See, just a few loose ends to finish… the usual 90/90 rule of software engineering.