DOI: 10.11118/978-80-7509-990-7-0075

SMART OCCUPANCY DETECTOR FOR MODEL RAILROAD

Jan Horáček¹, Jiří Rybička²

¹ Faculty of Business and Economics, Mendel University in Brno, Zemědělská 1, 13 00 Brno, Czech Republic

² Department of Informatics, Faculty of Business and Economics, Mendel University in Brno, Zemědělská 1, 613 00 Brno, Czech Republic

For control of a model railway, simple track occupancy detectors are in use to detect the presence and absence of a vehicle on the track. However, these detectors do not use the full potential of a digital command control (DCC) system. A RailCom technology allows information to be obtained from the ve- hicle’s DCC decoder, thus the detector can receive operationally important data from the rolling stock vehicle. The subject of the paper is the description of requirements and design of an own RailCom detec- tor MTB-RC, which presents an alternative to commercially available model railway RailCom detectors. MTB-RC is an open-source and open-hardware project, which is also compatible with the rest of the trackside hardware used in the Track Vehicle Control Laboratory FBE MENDELU. MTB-RC can read the addresses of the DCC decoders present on the track and transmit them to the railway control software via MTBbus.

Klíčová slova: railroad, model, interlocking, RailCom, occupancy detector, Digital Command Control, DCC, economic sustainability

stránky: 75-83, online: 2024