The Orient Express. The Flying Scotsman. Ivor the Engine. All juggernauts of the rail community, but none powered by our microcontroller and all, thus, inferior in our eyes. Raspberry Pi Pico has been used in cooler and more interesting ways every day since its launch in January this year, but this is the first time we’ve seen it powering a miniature railway. KushagraK7 shared this compact application on Instructables, and we ended up down a rabbit hole of model trains enthusiasm.
What does Raspberry Pi Pico do here?
KushagraK7’s Raspberry Pi Pico controls the track voltage to control the speed of the train using pulse-width modulation (PWM). PWM is a method of reducing the average power delivered by an electrical signal. A motor driver powers the locomotive itself.
You gotta speed it up and then you gotta slow it down
This particular setup is designed to make the train start off slowly then speed up gradually each time it travels over a sensored segment of the track — that is, a segment equipped with an infrared sensor to detect whether a train is there. A therapeutic loop of the speeding-up process plays from this point in KushagraK7’s YouTube video.
Once the train reaches its top speed, it slows down again, coming to a complete halt after it passes the sensored track section once more. The train stops for a set amount of time, then starts up again. Fast, faster, slow, stop. Fast, faster, slow, stop. And on and on and on again. All without any human interaction needed – you can just watch. Super satisfying.
Hardware
How do I build it?
KushagraK7 has created an illustrated step-by-step tutorial for other miniature railway enthusiasts to follow, including when you should tidy up your wires, plus ideas to tinker with the code to adjust speed and stopping patterns.
Point us to your Raspberry Pi-powered model railway projects in the comments. Choo choooooooo.
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