Raspberry Pi base station with JMRI?

The RPi3 JMRI and DCC++ all work very well together. Just grab a 6" USB cable. GPIO ports are still available for other important things, like a cooling fan or touch screen.

If you really wanted to shove them in one small box, it would probably be much easier to solder internal wires between the two USB connectors than to mess around with the GPIO, and do a lot of custom programming.

Chinese Arduino uno $4. Chinese motor shield $10. Can't beat that on price.

Matt

 

Not really.

The GPIO header include a serial port, so building a product like the SProg ( going all the way back to the original serial only circuit ) and adapting it to the footprint of the GPIO header.

The fact that Andrew already has the SProg-Pi and SProg-nano in production speaks to the validity of the approach.
( http://www.sprog-dcc.co.uk/pisprog.shtml )

From an electrical design perspective, a USB device that includes an RS232 to USB adapter ( like the Arduino ) is more expensive because of the extra design work due to additional components. ( this is not to say the actual devices will be more or less expensive. That Has more todo with economies of scale than anything else.)

I will also say there are reasons to avoid additional cable connections. Cables sometimes get in the way, especially under crowded small layouts. Even eliminating one cable can sometimes make a huge difference when troubleshooting.

Paul

 

Okay, I'm resurrecting this thread. I'm a former mainframe programmer (COBOL/Fortran/BAL) that worked in the business field for over 30 years manipulating data, not processes or hardware. I am now contemplating getting a Raspberry Pi 3 for a variety of reasons. These include learning an object oriented language, learning about Linux based systems (I've been involved in microcomputers since the early days of Apple II and IBM XT), learning to use LED lighting effectively in a timed and random basis (lights on/off from central computer), signalling, and also decoder programming to eliminate taking my computer to the small layout that I have.

What I need is a place to get educated on the nomenclature and concepts used at a basic level such as HAT, shield, sketch, etc. I have found sites like the wikipedia entry for Arduino which help a lot, but am wondering if there are any other training type web sites that anyone can recommend.

I found this thread to be extremely helpful in getting a better understanding of the overall process but I WANT MORE! lol

 

I've found a lot of good train related Arduino projects at http://www.trainelectronics.com/miscellaneous_projects.htm

 

I have two Raspberry Pi 3/JMRI setups I am playing with. One is strictly tied to my NCE PowerHouse Pro through a USB/Serial connection. Not as impressive, but works very well.

Here is a picture of that:



My other setup is a Pi 3 using the new Pi-SPROG board. This is pretty slick! It's a command station all on a single board that plugs right onto the Pi 3. I essentially have a complete JMRI power command station in a single box. I recently put it in the same style metal case as the one shown above. the difference is, I left the back panel off so I can access the wago pluggable terminal blocks for power in and DCC out to the track. I'll see if I can get a picture tonight and post that here.

Here is the Pi-SPROG board:

 

Ah, I forgot that I had posted a little demo video on my YouTube channel of the Pi-SPROG board in action here:

 

Cool, thanks to both of you, helpful comments were appreciated.

 

Jason, where did you get that nifty blue metal case your Pi is in? Does it include a fan, or "just" additional headspace for a Hat?

 

Looks like RBrodzinsky answered the where question. Yeah, I love these because they are steel, so they are tough and plenty of headroom for boards. Plenty of room for the Pi-SPROG board.

In an unrelated project I built an ADS-B receiver station with an internal SDR and filter. The whole thing fit inside one of these cases and I just punched a hole in the back for a chasis mounted SMA connector to the antenna. It's all metal, so good shielding to keep out other RF noise.

 

That's kind of the idea in theory. Provide a base platform and build on it with what you actually need. It's kind of like buying a barebones PC for doing email and playing solitaire. I don't need a high end sound card or video output. The built in VGA and ethernet NIC are just fine. But if I decide that I want to run some graphics intensive game, then I probably need to beef up the video with a good quality card to give it that capability. To that point, I'm ok with paying $35 for the Pi 3 to just develop Python on and access through SHH, if that's it's intended purpose vs. if I want it run DCC, I'll pay $50-75 for a good command station add-on board to do that.

 

Exactly. A stand alone Sprog is call it $100. Your getting all the same functionality/hardware in the shield minus the $35 for the functionality of the PI you are using so ya would expect the board to be twice as much as the Pi3

The result is a much more powerful engine then a standalone SprOg as well since you would still have all the Pi3 functionality available.

It's Just cleaning it up a bit to be honest. I mean it costs less then $20 to do it with and arduino and motor shield but it's true that it's one more piece of equipment to hook up, etc. Plus to be fair there is some more functionality in there around short protection, and hopefully has close to as much current ability as the Pololu shield.

SO If you do a arduino uno plus pololu shield plus pi you are looking at $60ish whereas pi + Sprog pi and you are looking at $90-100.

Is it worth $30ish for one less piece of hardware, a much cleaner package, doing basically nothing yourself (granted connecting 2 pins and loading a sketch is like 10 minutes time but some won't want to do it)

Some people it will be some it won't. In my case I have a couple DCC++ with motor shields (working on a booster at the moment) that I like but they are just sitting around outside of a case and it's not pretty. So I will probably buy one shield so that I can in one neat package have a complete DCC system with JMRI hat I can carry around and take literally anywhere without having to hook lots of stuff up.

Now the bigger concern to be honest for me is with DCC++ being opened source we get cool projects like wireless throttles etc developed that are pretty cheap. You won't see that with the Sprog anytime soon I don't think.

 

A little bit of a derailment but has anyone found any cheap double height acrylic boxes for the mega? I want to be able to poke holes etc but have something surrounding it and the motor shield but don't want to go the $35 metal route yet though I do like that case.

Back on point with JMRIs throttle on the cell phone it gets you pretty close to what some have done with DCC++ wireless controllers. My issue is I still want to be able to turn a knob as well as be able to make the screen look reasonable. Engineservers throttle is just an ugly block. With Nextions the DCC_++ you can make it very attractive. Maybe with the new sprog and built in wireless of Pi something controller wise can be as easy as with DCC++ but I'm talking way over my head at this point!

 

Are you looking for a cooling fan, or just passive air flow?

http://www.makergeeks.com/lacutarrabox.html
Would this work.