My C128 at work

Here is my C128 I use to control a miniature railroad layout in scale 1:87. I can control the speed and direction (forward-reverse) of two trains at the same time, street and houses lights, sound, turntable, windmill, lighthouse, signals... and it has also a rf remote control and two CRT monitors to the same computer. In some pictures you can see it. The code program has 430 lines. The boxes near the monitor have the electronics inside like dtmf decoder, digital-analog converter and the power stage to control the 12 volt trains. The speed has 16 different levels. you can control all the functions by the keyboard, joysticks or the remote control. It is running since 1998!! Enjoy it smiley

C128_tren1.JPGC128_tren2.JPG22.JPG23.JPG24.JPG

 

My Commodore 128. I made the

My Commodore 128. I made the software to control the speed, direction (forward-reverse), emergency stop of 2 trains independently also lights, semaphores, signals, turntable, windmill, lighthouse etc. Maybe you can identify something in the pictures. The program consists in 430 lines of code. I made a digital to analog interface to control the speed of trains in 16 scales of speed. To make the rf control receiver I used a DTMF decoder. I used both user port and expansion port to get some extra I/O. Hope you like it  !!!

César

Great work!

Great work!
 
I love to see projects like this. Back in they day, I too had a railroad "toy", I believe it was called Fleischmann (scale 1:87, voltage was separated in gnd in one track and +V in the other). The guy we bought it from made a lot of houses himself out of cardboard and other matetrial, he was very skilled in that, he took inspiration from the magazines. I expanded the collection with the plastic houses you could glue yourself. My skills weren't (still aren't) as good as his making houses.
 
Anyway if I had the space, I'd probably have wanted to have a computer (c64) control the tracks too. But I have no skills in programming other than simple basic and simple assembler. If it was today it might not be a problem other than the space.
 
I'd love to see more pics and perhaps a video of what you do on screen, and what happens on the tracks.
 
Edit: Would you share your work with the rest of the community?, schematics, software etc.
I hope you don't mind, I've spread the word: http://awesome.commodore.me/c128-controlling-a-railroad-model/

Awesome!

That's amazing.  I enjoy building models myself, but of the airplane / starship variety (ah, you can't really play with them like trains).  Anyway, I thought it very intersting that use RF and DTMF signals.  Well the RF would sure cut down on the wiring / give freedom to walk around your huge layout :)  But the DTMF really suprised me.  Now that I think about it, that sounds like a good (standardized) way to modulate an RF signal and off-the shelf parts should be available...
 
But I was also curious about the DTMF generation.  Are you using the C128 to send control signals to a DTMF generator chip (like a modem) or maybe using two of the SID voices to generate them with C128 itself?  I never would have thought the later was feasible until playing a game called Impossible Mission where at one point you "connect" to a remote computer (in the game, not really) and the dial-tone / DTMF signals sounded exactly like a real phone... not sort of computer game-ish imitation but a real telephone.
 
I was a kid then and knowing more about electronics now it seems very do-able, but just curious how YOU actually did it.  So yeah, if you have any schematics or program listing to share, that would be cool.


I'm kupo for Kupo nuts!

Pages

Log in or register to post comments