While my new layout will be bigger then my current one, I will start to use some control panels.
You know control panels, with a graphical representation of (a part of) your model railroad.
it consists mostly out of “lines”, “switches” and multicolored LEDs
(representing the “state” of a piece of railroad, to indicate if it’s occupied or not)
Because some parts of my layout are hidden, and I have lots of trains, I wanted to “see” some train info
onto this control panel.
Within Rocrail, you have the “dumper” library. This gives you the possibility to serially “dump” info.
You also have the possibility to show train name etc … within a block, inside Rocrail.
If you combine these 2 things, you have the start of a nice system.
I will create a little device with an ESP32, that connects via USB with the Rocrail computer, and will show up
as a serial device. With a little self-written configuration tool, I will be able to send this data over wifi, to another ESP32 device. This “other” ESP32 device (possibility to have more then one !”), will connect to max. 64 I2C displays.
Those I2C OLED displays are very tiny, 0.91″, and have a resolution of 128×32 pixels.
You can easily integrate them within your “lines”, representing your model railroad layout.
Stay tuned, more to come in the near future …
