I finally had some time to work on more revisions to my Xbee control widgets. I’ve now gotten one to drive a QSI decoder I picked up for my Aristo Dash9 last month. I’ve eliminated the motor controller and the direction relay and now just drive the decoder directly, no other parts. Took a bit of tweaking, I couldn’t get the QSI to behave with extended DCC packets for the throttle. Not sure why, I didn’t think the firmware in the QSI was that old? Who knows? I’ll do some more research on that aspect later. Anyhow, I switched to the base level packets and it now works great. I still need to mess with the CVs to get the sounds balanced right and the accel and decel dialed in but it’s pretty neat.
Since much of the Internet of Things market (about 60% or so) seems to be built around the 802.14.5 wireless network, I’ve been slowly moving in that direction. I don’t like the proprietary R/C stuff and prefer an open network sort of design so I’ve been working on this for a while now. My goal is to control everything, including my live steam 060 and my turnouts with this. I have the rudiments of an Internet gateway using a Raspberry Pi started so I guess I can call it that now. Besides, I think ‘Xbee’ is a silly name eh? IoT is just more cool. ha. IoTT ? Hmm.
Anyhow, if you are interested, I have a post on my blog with some pictures and video.