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New radio control


Go_West

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Hi Roger

yes the only live steam was my little blue GWR S69 and Silver Link. I wish I had more time with paul as I could have run more of my rebuilt engine but as they say " time is short when your having fun" and I think all the people that were there that day found it to be a most interesting to be involved.

Paul is such a nice chap and takes his railway very seriously be it DC or live steam and the video does not seem to show just how good a garden railway system he's built. But then he is an expert in this field and has built many layouts of this type for other so if you are thinking of a garden set up he would be the chap to ask.

Ken

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The parts that you can see are very impressive - so your mission is to go again and take some more video  😎

 

I could watch that sort of thing all day.

 

Good of Paul to let you "play" and well done you with the models and the video.

 

R-

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Ken

There has to be a market for that R/C system to be applied to more than just live steam.

I can see the tender being the battery pack area and the loco,carrying the Rx and a speed controller for the motor and direction swapping.

Diesels would have room for it all on board.

Purpose built chassis would make best use of space.

Rob

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Hi Rob

as you say lots of room in the tender for RX and speed controller and these you can get off the shelf now and very small units too. You could easy fix the speed by a standard DC controller and make the final settings via the radio this would probably work the same for digital Systems.

ken

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There has to be a market for that R/C system to be applied to more than just live steam.

There are already several manufacturers of battery operated radio control systems for model railways. The challenge at the moment seems to be getting everything in the locomotive, especially steam ones and retro-fitting the charging port for the battery. I'm not sure if this is the correct terminology but at least one maker is trying to get batteries to charge via the "near field communication" (?) method. R-

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Hi

i would have thought that as most DCC systems would have power standing on the rails that a smd power unit could run the radio gear straight from the track but not sure what the advantage is with radio over DCC as I thought you could use your phone now to control your trains?

ken

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Near field charging must be a doddle as all it needs is an area of track converted to become a pseudo charging mat, possibly by way of an underlay.

 

The power supply discussion is dead in the water as the whole idea of R/C is to provide on board power controlled by airwaves, hence any track power is redundant Unless for recharging purposes.  Hence not uninterruptible critical.

 

Rob

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  • 3 months later...

Radio Control System Mk4

Now coming to the end of designing a radio control system for Hornby live steam for those that operate a large layout or garden railway.

As requested by my chief test engineer can I make it smaller and simpler to use and this is what I hope is the final  system./media/tinymce_upload/27c3ea5155198446a4ed6ead5ac596c0.jpg

The system comprises of 3 main units as follows.1 The Hornby power supply unit 2 A new control unit 3 And a hand held transmitter

The transmitter has only a few basic controls which are the black knob at the top is for controlling the engines forwards and backwards functions. The red and green buttons reset the Hornby power unit by turning ON and OFF the power.

The heat setting can not be adjusted from the transmitter by need to be set before the run starts as most operates of live steam have found this is not an essential requirement.

/media/tinymce_upload/965daaf118ab957bbb321f28f197c55a.JPG

This new unit as we look at the main panel has its incoming and out going connections at the rear of the unit and connects direct to the track.

The power ON/OFF switch with its green power ON light, next to this is a digital volt meter which can be a volt/amps meter if required.Bottom left is the heat setting switch with 3 main heat settings and a red light to show which has been selected similar to the Hornby unit.

/media/tinymce_upload/e0bc960c47a207afffb7e5299d7cecc2.jpg

In the centre is the regulator lever with its 2 LED’s to show the last action taken with the rgulator.

And lastly is the adjustable delay timer which can be set from no timer to about 2 seconds this idea was built into the controller because the servo motor speed can not be relied upon in the loco and they all tend to operate differently and the more sluggish of these engines can be hard to control but by adding a short or long power up time better control can be achieved.The unit will transmit a good distance some 90 meters or so and should cover most gardens and large indoor layouts I will take some video which might give you a better understanding of my system.

Ken

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