Wireless tagging for beginners
I will preface this question with a caveat: I'm a reasonably talented programmer, but an absolute novice in electronics. This will be my first project.
My dad has a 1/19th scale model railway. I'd quite like to add announcements to the passenger trains, of the form "This station is X. Welcome aboard the HH:MM service to Y."
I thought it might be possiblw to swipe a "destination" tag at the beginning of the journey to set Y. X would be set by a tag at the station when the train passes/rests for a couple of seconds. https://www.publixoasis.us/ The range, i guess, would be about 80mm from the building to the far edge of the track. It'd be worth bearing in mind that, being on a train, exact positioning will be a challenge and so either it'd need to be read just as the train passed the station or have a longer range to allow for stopping in the wrong place.
Does that sound (a) feasible, (b) the best way to do it, and (c) relatively easy?
Ideally the components would be fairly low cost. Adding some level of electrical power to the station buildings would be possible (they'd basically be balsa wood boxes).
Longer term, I'd be thinking about possibly adding other things on to this system (e.g. automatic points switching), but wanted to bring it down to a minimal system/infrastructure before attempting anything fancy.
My dad has a 1/19th scale model railway. I'd quite like to add announcements to the passenger trains, of the form "This station is X. Welcome aboard the HH:MM service to Y."
I thought it might be possiblw to swipe a "destination" tag at the beginning of the journey to set Y. X would be set by a tag at the station when the train passes/rests for a couple of seconds. https://www.publixoasis.us/ The range, i guess, would be about 80mm from the building to the far edge of the track. It'd be worth bearing in mind that, being on a train, exact positioning will be a challenge and so either it'd need to be read just as the train passed the station or have a longer range to allow for stopping in the wrong place.
Does that sound (a) feasible, (b) the best way to do it, and (c) relatively easy?
Ideally the components would be fairly low cost. Adding some level of electrical power to the station buildings would be possible (they'd basically be balsa wood boxes).
Longer term, I'd be thinking about possibly adding other things on to this system (e.g. automatic points switching), but wanted to bring it down to a minimal system/infrastructure before attempting anything fancy.
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This seems like the wrong place to ask this question. Maybe by chance there'll be someone who can answer it, but you'll definitely have better luck in an electronics forum.
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surely someone has a low cost solution to get the distance and ID which train is which. Some sort of low range RFID, or a revolution counter on the wheels, etc. Or a sensor on the train that when it passes a point it broadcasts some sort of "I am so and so" causing the terminal to register which one it is, and knowing where that one is going, it pulls up the right audio.
I don't know the best way -- but I know this is a huge hobby and someone out there has your answer...
I don't know the best way -- but I know this is a huge hobby and someone out there has your answer...
Sounds like an opportunity for an Arduino/Raspberry Pi combined with software written for it to manage the whole railway system. There are plenty of OLED display, laser, wifi, bluetooth and gps hardware possibilities to hook up to the controller.
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