RC Control for Garden Railway

Hi All,
I'm thinking of adding support for a pressure transducer to my RC receiver e.g.

Pressure Transducer Sensor 5V 0-1.2Mpa Oil Fuel For Gas Water Air | Lazada.co.th

Pressure Transducer Sensor 5V0-1.2Mpa Oil Fuel For Gas Water Air. Working Voltage: 5VDC. Output Voltage: 0.5-4.5 VDC. material: Metal ABS. Working Current: less than equal 10 mA. Working Pressure Range: 0-1.2 Mpa. The Biggest Pressure: 2.4 MPa. Color: black+silver. Cable length: 19cm. Destroy...
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This will display the live boiler pressure on the mobile device, it can also be incorporated into the burner control valve so it keeps the boiler at a relatively constant pressure.

So far I have Support for:
16 servo's,
4 (analog or digital) sensors e.g. (pressure, water level, speed, IR/ultrasonic receiver) the receiver is for track side control's, e.g signals, crossings, etc.
Dual DC motor control (20A)

My question to this forum is what am I missing, what can you think of that makes sense for live steam models or electric models, I'm not thinking about RC Cars or drones (way too many of those already, diy and commercial). My focus is to create a custom setup for live steam models but also support electric trains and boats.
 
les said:
FYI this is the Control Electronics I use for my Wall-e robot. I use Bluetooth to control him.
Cameras are on a different Circuit.
View attachment 77
Click to expand...
Les, as a schematic, it's easy to understand and kind of makes sense, except...

...the 12 Chanel Servo Controller has outputs to 7 servos, presumably each with a two way movement, but only has 5 wires coming into it from the Arduino. Can't see how that would work. No need to explain, les, just an observation.
 
Les, Radio Control parts arrived. Now what?

I have now received the Receiver, Electronic Speed Controller and the DC-DV Voltage converter and incorporated them into the Control Schematic all as below.

Now I 'just' need to assemble them and get them to work which is way outside my sphere of knowledge. So many different wires and connectors!

The information for the Brushless ESC looks a bit dubious to me. All the details that came with the devices can be downloaded as a pdf.

Where do I start, Les?

How about if I made a tabulated schedule of all the input/output wires for all the devices and tried to work out what connects to what?

Photo of the Three RC Devices as Received:-

240725-LMS-2F-Radio-Control-Gear-Received.jpg

Updated Schematic for the RC Control System (Simplified):-

Power-Motor-DC-Radio-Controllers-Schematics-02-240425-01.png
 

Attachments

Hi Alan,
No problem we can figure this out together and get you up and running, I just got out of the workshop, finally got some time after 3 weeks :)
I got the wheels cleaned and painted and assembled the flywheel. I started on the dome but to be honest it does not look good, the casting left a few deep pit marks so I think I'm going to re-melt it and cast it again.

I'm going to grab some dinner and help my nephew with some English homework so will probably take a look in the morning and send you a wiring diagram with colors.
Just noticed the ESC has a 5v output to power the receiver so you will not need the Buck converter for now only when you are driving lots of Servo's
 
Hi Alan,
Your Schematic above looks good the only thing to change for this design is to remove the 12v->5v buck converter, keep it safe we will use it later when you add more than 2 Servo's. For your electric train we will use the internal buck converter in the ESC.

OK, first things first you have to be super careful about battery polarity to the ESC, apparently the ESC will be instantly destroyed and will catch fire if you connect the battery wrong.

So make sure you have a non reversible connector that can handle the power on the battery and ESC. (2 pole white square connector on the ESC). The ESC works with 2 cell and 3 cell lipo only, it sounds like you have a 3 cell lipo.
Make sure the jumpers on the ESC are 1->2 & 4->5
Do not connect the motor but again make sure you have a non reversible connector with enough wire for your model (polarity does not matter for the motor), but reversing the wires will reverse the direction on the remote so better to have a non reversible connector so you can decouple it in the field and re-couple easily.

Having put the connectors on and checking polarity is all ok, its time to plug it all together (all 3 connections :) )
1. Connect the battery to the ESC, turn the ESC on and check all is ok.
2. Turn the ESC off and connect the 3 pin black connector from the ESC to the receiver channel 2, black wire goes to the outside, white wire to the inside.
Futaba-r203gf.png
3. Turn on ESC, do not worry if the receiver LED does not turn on.
4. Follow this Youtube video to pair and configure your Transmitter & Receiver so they work together.

That's it you should be all set to remote control your train.
 
FYI on car remotes:
The ESC's like the 203gf are programmed to give an initial burst of power when you first squeeze the accelerator then they drop the power back to the setting based on how hard you are squeezing the trigger, this initial burst of power is called the punch, it is meant to overcome the inertia of the model to get it going quickly. This is great for cars and boats, as the propeller or tyres have a lot of initial traction, however a train does not have the same traction being steel on steel, so the punch is likely to just spin the train wheels (not good for wheels or track).
I think the P3V has a setting where you can reduce the punch value. This one is going to be a bit of trial and error and only affects the initial start so perhaps ok for now, just FYI if you stop and start a lot it could become an issue.
I will put some code in my Arduino based RC, (train mode) to allow a soft start for trains or a punch start for other models.
 
les said:
Hi Alan,
Your Schematic above looks good the only thing to change for this design is to remove the 12v->5v buck converter, keep it safe we will use it later when you add more than 2 Servo's. For your electric train we will use the internal buck converter in the ESC.

OK, first things first you have to be super careful about battery polarity to the ESC, apparently the ESC will be instantly destroyed and will catch fire if you connect the battery wrong.

So make sure you have a non reversible connector that can handle the power on the battery and ESC. (2 pole white square connector on the ESC). The ESC works with 2 cell and 3 cell lipo only, it sounds like you have a 3 cell lipo.
Make sure the jumpers on the ESC are 1->2 & 4->5
Do not connect the motor but again make sure you have a non reversible connector with enough wire for your model (polarity does not matter for the motor), but reversing the wires will reverse the direction on the remote so better to have a non reversible connector so you can decouple it in the field and re-couple easily.

Having put the connectors on and checking polarity is all ok, its time to plug it all together (all 3 connections :) )
1. Connect the battery to the ESC, turn the ESC on and check all is ok.
2. Turn the ESC off and connect the 3 pin black connector from the ESC to the receiver channel 2, black wire goes to the outside, white wire to the inside.
View attachment 110
3. Turn on ESC, do not worry if the receiver LED does not turn on.
4. Follow this Youtube video to pair and configure your Transmitter & Receiver so they work together.

That's it you should be all set to remote control your train.
Click to expand...
Les, I'm getting ready to follow your steps to getting the RC train working. One question your say "4. Follow this Youtube video to pair and configure your Transmitter & Receiver so they work together." What's the link for the Youtube movie, please?
 
Hi Alan,
Battery might be a problem, need to check battery voltage when fully charged. This is an older Li-Ion so it might be 14.4v.
Modern LiPo batteries are 11.1v, you can probably get away with 12v but if your battery is 14.4v I think the ESC will get too hot and not work.

ESC manual states 6v-12v, 2c or 3c LiPo (that is actually 7.4v - 11.1v).
If the battery voltage is too high we have 2 choices, add a voltage regulator to drop the current battery voltage down to 11.1v or purchase a 3c LiPo battery.

Sorry I forgot to add the link:
 
Awesome, 11.7v open circuit is what we wanted to see.
So you should be good to connect up.
 
RC Control Garden Rail - Success! (y)

This email says it all:-

From: modeleng
Aug 7, 2024, 9:54 AM
to Les, Alex, George

Hi Les,

Many thanks for your call & help via LINE this morning.

I'm thrilled and delighted to report that the RC Control of the G1 Garden Rail Loco is now working perfectly, thanks to your help and guidance.

The only reason it wasn't working before was that I didn't wait long enough for the linking of the transmitter to receiver process to complete.
Click to expand...

So, now my Radio Control for the Garden Railway is working fine - all thanks to les who guided me all the way to success.

I've now updated the Radio Control Schematic Drawing showing all my actual RC components and the wiring details. In fact it's a wiring diagram now.

Power-Motor-DC-Radio-Controllers-Schematics-03-240823.png

Now I'm installing all the radio control components into the Gauge 1 railway wagon then ready to run a train on the test track!
 
Last edited:
Hi, you indicate that the ESC delivers 0 ~ -8.5V or 0 ~ +11.5V to the motor. This would indicate that the ESC is simply a voltage controller and not something more sophisticated like a PWM or VFD controller?

If so it's a pretty crude, cheap and old fashioned control method.

Also this ESC is specifically designed for Brushed Motors. If the control is so crude to be just a voltage controller then why does it have to be different to a controller for a Brushless Motor?
 
Hi Istemodel, all good questions :)
Check out this video
He does a good job of describing brushless motor control, BLDC control is basically PWM with back emf for speed control.
DC motor control is basically a constant current source, so voltage is used to control the current.
Hence the ESC for BDC vs BLDC are very different.
 
Good morning, all
Just reading this at four o'clock in the morning. Just got out of bed. Very interesting write up.
And must have taken hours to write. Head is swimming trying to understand half of it.
Think I will stick with steam. But then I read the thread about copper boiler shell thickness for traction engines and become equally mind blown.
Keep up the good work just shows we do not need artificial intelligence there is real intelligence out there.
 
modeleng said:
Les, I think the battery pack has 6 cells. See photos.

View attachment 111 View attachment 112
Click to expand...

Just now I started to fix the battery into the railway wagon and it was just a few mm too high - above the wagon sides. There was a 'lump' on the side of the battery where the wiring goes in to the battery terminals. I though maybe just clumsy wiring and if I can straighten the the wiring out a bit I might be able to 'iron out' the lump. So I stripped off the plastic outer covering of the battery pack and what did I see?

A tiny printed circuit board with chips on it. Ah! This must be the BMS, I thought. (BMS = Battery Management System)

Well I had previously been concerned about this having ready that to charge these LiPo batteries safely there should be a BMS, Now it seems I have one! Delighted. Here's a picture of the battery stripped of it's outer covering showing the BMS (if that's what it is):-

240824-RC-Control-Battery-BMS.jpg

Needles to say it was easy to wrap more tape around the battery before putting it in the gauge 1 garden railway wagon.
 
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modeleng said:
RC Control Garden Rail - Success! (y)

This email says it all:-



So, now my Radio Control for the Garden Railway is working fine - all thanks to les who guided me all the way to success.

I've now updated the Radio Control Schematic Drawing showing all my actual RC components and the wiring details. In fact it's a wiring diagram now.

View attachment 140

Now I'm installing all the radio control components into the Gauge 1 railway wagon then ready to run a train on the test track!
Click to expand...
I have now fitted Radio Control to my gauge 1 Garden Railway locomotive and this is the first run of the engine plus wagons on an indoor track.

All the RC gear including receiver, speed controller and battery for the RC gear and loco motor power is in the first wagon behind the engine.

 
Very cool, let me know when you want to fully automate your garden railway.
I have been thinking about the home made RC controller, will send you some wire frames in a couple of weeks (mock up of the UI)

Currently researching GPS so I can show where your train is on a map, challenge is GPS resolution, I'm also talking with a friend back in Sunnyvale about passive clothing tags, might be a way to put tags around the track so as the train passes it sends back position information, challenge is making the tags 100% waterproof, not require any battery or power source and obviously cheap and easy to make.

I think I can use a near field transducer and reader, so the train energizes the transducer as it passes over the tag and gets a value, we then map the values to a location on the display so we can display the trains location on a map of the track layout.
Then on the master control (garden layout control) it gets the location of all the trains on the layout and controls signals, crossings and crossover points, the train will receive feedback from the master controller (each train has a seperate IP address) so it can stop/start, forward/backward, blow whistle, turn on/off lights.

Ultimate goal is to be able to create schedules and movements, then let the trains operate independently.
Your challenge will be to keep the railway running smoothly, just like the real world.
 
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