New Method of Electronic Control of Model Railroad Track

Abstract

The digital control of a model railroad track requires the control of the movement of vehicles and their functions (sounds, lighting) as well as control of trackside elements (switches, signals, occupancy detectors, etc.). While the control of the vehicles is provided by a standard whose functionality is perfectly adequate for normal operation, the control of the trackside elements can be carried out in several ways. For small domestic lines, there are commercial solutions from various companies, but for extensive (large) lines there is no such concept, and the appropriate solution is usually tailored to the application (club lines, simulators for training railroad staff). The tracks in the Railway Vehicles Control Laboratory of the Faculty of Business and Economics of Mendel University in Brno can be classified as large; therefore, a special system is required. However, the existing system is not suitable for several basic reasons. Therefore, a modernized system was developed. A new protocol for the RS485 bus was designed, the hardware and firmware of a new GPIO slave module MTB-UNI v4 was developed, a new RS485 master module MTB-USB was developed and two other new hardware modules including firmware for their MCUs were developed. A computer application MTB Daemon and a library for accessing the bus were developed. The result is a system that meets the relatively high requirements and enables further development and use in the laboratory.