Just noticed that Raspberry Pi prices have been dropping and seem to be more available. Amazon has 2 gig Pi 4 at $70 and $60 on eBay. I love my DCC-EX and Pi system a lot. Turn a power strip on and up and running with.... https://1fatgmc.com/RailRoad/DCC/WiTcontroller-Index.html ... a $50 wireless throttle or a phone throttle a minute later. With JMRI on the Pi it is a snap to program DCC decoders. https://1fatgmc.com/RailRoad/DCC/page-1.html Sumner
Good news; I invested a lot of time writing a DCC command station for the RPi, I've got the boards I need, but the low supply wasn't going to help anyone else use it.
Maybe SPROG can start shipping turn-key Pi SPROG 3 series DCC systems again soon. They've been just shipping the Pi-SPROG 3 series hats and enclosures. The hats also work on the R-Pi400, which were more available throughout the shortage, since the 400 is not used by OEMs for other products.
ive got the pi4 but still cant make it work right. seems every time i get a short the whole shabang goes bonkers and i have to wipe out the sd card and reinstall. It kinda confuses its self and does weird things like full throttle and no control...so i just gave up with it. BUT my DCC++EX Arduino is running stronger than ever and i absolutely love that. still have the pi4 hooked up to a spare Arduino setup hoping that one day i can use it. ive currently got it setup for that test loop but have not used it . so i have no idea if it even works for that or not. I sure was looking forward to having that with its own 10 screen to work my layout... but it frustrated me to the point of getting the big hammer out. be nice if i could get that figgered out, but i seem to be the only one who has that problem of a loco running into a turnout turned the wrong track and shorting out and it going bonkers after that....
That's the nice thing about laptops, they have a battery they can run on and get things squared away before actually shutting off. I would definitely make sure your Pi is not running on a supply that runs anything else, since if those other things are subject to shorting, they take out the Pi's power suddenly, without a chance for you to shutdown properly. Some SD cards are better than others, but none are particularly good at rapid, short writes to close out multiple open files at shutdown. Many solid state drives (SSDs) are much better at that. Linux can have many files open (e.g. log files) all the time, and those have to be properly flushed to the filesystem's storage media before power is removed. The sections of the files on media are kept in RAM while the files are open for performance reasons. You can also look online for instructions on wiring a certain pin on the IO connector to a momentary switch that will force an orderly shutdown of the OS even if you do not have a terminal window open, or keyboard/monitor hooked up. Their used to be a mini/partial hat that included the momentary button switch for shutting down. I don't know if they are still available. One of the advantages of the Pi-400, is that it includes a key on the keyboard to shutdown the OS properly before you remove power.
