Information on how to control Magnorail tracks using reed switches and Arduino boards, and the various problems I had associated with laying the roadbed for the Accident model
John, what a delight to see the end result! A very creative scene that goes far beyond the usual static scenery of a model! Bravo, sir! Although I have other areas in which my creativity is focused I can appreciate that you had to plan, design, test, tweak and work a lot to make the finished product. God bless you, John! Well done!!
Andrew, thanks for your kind comments. If you appreciated this video, I'm certain you'll like the next one that is going to be even more unusual and innovative. But it will take me about 4 months to make the new model.
OMG ! John, thank you SO much for 'introducing' me to this ! - I had absolutely NO knowledge of Magnorail... I did some work for Gerry Anderson on Thunderbirds (a very long time ago!) and know he, as I am now, would have been stunned at how useful this could have been !!! Take care, Mike
No idea how or why I'm here on this channel, but thanks RU-vid! This is just amazing! Mad skills on so many levels! Looks like fun, but no way I'd have the patience for all this.
Interesting to see this now. A few years ago, we used this system for a professional exhibit. But we used hall sensors and replaced the DC motors with servo stepper motors, so we could get synchronized travel, repeatable speed and just used one hall sensor per track as a reset point. Also used a fast Arduino Due.
For something basic you don’t need a fast microcontroller. The classic arduinos are slow but are definitely fast enough for models like this, people have even made drones with classic arduinos and they require a lot more precise timing and computation than a model. If you find you need a more powerful microcontroller for something basic it generally means you have inefficient or lazy code. You should also use everything available to you. Driving stepper motors directly from microcontrollers is a waste (not saying you did but just pointing it out). Just get a cheap stepper driver and then all you need is a signal to tell it the direction you want and a signal to tell it to step and the stepper driver will handle the actual motor movements and can do things like microstepping to get smaller steps or if using “silent” stepper drivers then the motor itself won’t make any noise.
@@conorstewart2214 For each level of micro stepping for example, you also need to provide double as many pulses to the stepper driver, for the same amount of rotation. So again having a fast micro is advantageous. Actually a lot of examples where the good old 8-bitters CAN perform, but DON'T particularly well. And there is no reason to optimize software to run on an underpowered micro if you're doing a one-off.
Hi folks, I suggest using needle nose pliers or similar to hold the reed switch wires between the bend and the glass to further minimise the risk of damage. This action model looks wonderful does n't it!
Brilliant! You confirm the discussion I had with a model maker-integralist: for him the models shouldn't be mobile, but all fixed! Evidently ten years ago I could already see far! But your model; very nice... only ever seen such a curved short bridge!!! 😊
What an incredibly beautiful diorama with Magnorail. Thank you for your explanations. Best model railway greetings from Germany and thanks for sharing!
First of all, this is a very good scene and takes Magnorail way further than I have seen before. Here's a suggestion though, something that would add a bit more realism would be to extend this concept to also control the speed of the Magnorail motor slowing it down so it's more realistic when vehicles go round corners.
I'm starting work on a brand new model in the new year which I think will intrigue people! If you subscribe to my channel you will be notified when the video goes on line. Thanks for your interest.
Do you know about state machine programming? It's where you have a place in the code for every combination of events. So, the initial state would be "motors off". The next state would be "bicycle running before accident". The next state would be "bicycle stopped, rider thrown". Etc. The transition between the states is driven by the inputs, or a timer. So you would have a timer with a random timeout (so the scenario gets run at random intervals), which gets set when entering State 0 (motors off). When that timer fires, it sets the state to State 1 (bicycle running before accident) and turns on the motor for the bicycle magnorail track. It stays in State 1 until the reed switch fires saying that the bicyclist has reached his doom, then it enters State 2. Etc. It makes it very easy to make a script, because once you have created the engine that drives the state machine, the states themselves are like Lego(tm) bricks. If you want to change the script, just move the states and their actions and their triggers around.
4:55 You don't need the external pull-down resistor. The Arduino's I/O pins already have an internal pull-down resistor that's takes effect when you configure the pin with INPUT_PULLDOWN.
Earlier Atmega CPUs don't have that, just internal pull-ups. Of course he can just wire the reed switches to connect to ground and invert the meaning of the inputs.
Very cool. I can only imagine how many hours of work went into this. I did a project some years ago where we wanted to demo something at a convention so we built a slot car track and we wanted to time the laps and have a board with the information in real time. We started with reed switches but couldn't get them to measure the passing cars accurately. I don't know if there was lots of electrical interference from the slot or if the car just went by too fast but we had to go with another solution. I did not know at the time that the orientation of the reed switch was important. We had an intern at the time doing the electronics and I wonder if he knew, he was really smart so he might have. If I ever bump into him I will have to find out. Maybe that was a reason for the problems we encountered.
Now Scale it up from a Mini-Miniaturwunderland to a Miniaturwunderland. This little piece really leaves you in awe of what the guys in Hamburg have created.
Would have liked to see more about the assembly, configuration, and operation of the track underneath. I suppose I should see if can look that up. Anyway, very charming scenario for the sequence.
This is very educational as we learn also how the vehicles move on the Thomas the Tank Engine model series. I was wondering myself how the make vehicles like Bertie the Bus move or how sometimes the trucks or lorries move. And this is how it's done!
Marvellous stuff! Something to delight me as a 50 year old, but the 'magic' of it would have fascinated my (former) 5 year old self even more! Could vehicles designed for the Faller Car System work? Advantage being having working lights (though no doubt functionality would be limited versus a proper Faller road system), but maybe the front steering would function more like a real vehicle. Obviously the vehicle would need the motor to be removed or mechanically isolated. Problem with the Faller system seems to be that the vehicles need to be quite large to accomodate the drive system and battery, meaning that you are restricted mostly to commercial vehicles. With Magnorail, normal cars, as well as bikes and presumably motorbikes, could be used- but not as autonomously, since all vehicles on a chain would start and stop together. But I bet both systems could at least be used side-by-side.
This is outstanding and very clever. I want to build a variation of this idea and wonder if the script for the Bicycle Accident is available. It would be a good starting place.
WRT using photopaper as the running surface, polypropylene poster paper is pretty widely used in print for outdoor posters, it's similar to the stuff the new banknotes are made of, and I'd imagine it would work well as a replacement. If you had it printed on a suitable UV printer it would get a nice scale-accurate-ish matt finish for tarmac etc surfaces.
The sequence that I saw was quite funny; the “magnetic” cyclist appears to cycle out of the barn > along the road and between the chevron signs and crashes > the ambulance appears and drives to the crashed cyclist, picks it up and wizzes off and the camera panned to the church yard and “there is the cyclists grave being dug” 😄
I'd never heard of Magnarail before watching this, and I', so fascinated! :O The thumbnail looked particularly wild, like a robotic looking spin fossilised in stone :O Regarding Arduinos, I have a few genuine ones I got from Maplin years back (remember Maplin? :O) and I used those with the ISP program to problam bare chips. I can make incredibly miniaturised circuits that way
I used to run and get the maplins catalog of parts like it was my childhood comic 😊 Helped with tearing down vcr's and things for investigation. Loved brass and steel mechanicals in electronics.
@@luminousfractal420 I took apart an older model VCR a few years back, and the mechanism and arrangement of components compared to more modern VCRs is so much more wildly complex and satisfying :D The VCR really is the perfect marriage of electronics and mechanical engineering
Magnificent work. I've been trying to solve a problem with simulated running water. I've been relying on analog motors to transport a card stock "stream". I wonder if this could be harnessed for same? Cheers!
Hi John, I know I'm 3 yrs late in getting to the party, but what you've created is amazing. I'm now looking at doing something similar to my railway. Would there be any chance of a glimpse of your schematics and arduino sketches.?
There are tiny (less than 2mmx2mm) RFID tags that you could either embed in the chain or attach to a vehicle and attach a reader antenna to the track like the reed switch and use that to trigger vehicle specific actions along the track
That is adding too much complexity for a simple system like this. Everything along the chain moves at the same time and at the same speed in a very predictable motion. If you had pieces not on tracks and moving autonomously then maybe RFID tags would be a good idea, but in most track based system they are unnecessary.
Have you looked at the accompanying video on using reed switches and Arduino boards at ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-ieiawg7offE.html
