BD20
Occupancy Detection Yet Again
About fifteen months ago work on adding occupancy detection to Sumida Crossing stalled. That was in part because I’d planned to use the BDL168 detectors to also do transponding, and a few months earlier had abandoned that plan since I was unable to get that aspect to work reliably, even on a simple test track. The number of solder joints on the BDL was also a nuisance that caused me to put off further work.
Recently I’ve been rethinking my approach. The BDL168 is an amazingly cost-effective solution. Ignoring the transponding part, you get 16 detectors on a board that includes a LocoNet bus interface for US$120 (street price). That’s $7.50 per detector (if you can use all 16). That’s really hard to beat for a bus-connected detector. I’d originally planned to install one per table on the layout, and my cost would have worked out to around $10 to $15 per detector on average.
On the other hand, I’m thinking that I might want to move to either a OpenLCB/NMRAnet bus (if I want a feature-rich bus for the future) or a really dumb serial bus (like S88 or C/MRI). The latter is attractive since I can potentially interface to it with an Arduino, opening up some room for home-brew devices. Of course I could do that with NMRAnet, but today that requires a US$45 shield to add to the Arduino (or one with it built in), which kind of takes away from the appeal of using $10 Arduinos to do things like drive signal masts.
While thinking about this, I went off and started researching what was available commercially or as home-brew circuitry and software libraries for these busses and for doing occupancy detection with them, as the latter would be a good way to get my feet wet and solve my “don’t want to solder those #$@! BDL168s any more” problem.
But in the past week I’ve been sidetracked into looking at homebrew inductive-coil detection circuits.
Read More...
Recently I’ve been rethinking my approach. The BDL168 is an amazingly cost-effective solution. Ignoring the transponding part, you get 16 detectors on a board that includes a LocoNet bus interface for US$120 (street price). That’s $7.50 per detector (if you can use all 16). That’s really hard to beat for a bus-connected detector. I’d originally planned to install one per table on the layout, and my cost would have worked out to around $10 to $15 per detector on average.
On the other hand, I’m thinking that I might want to move to either a OpenLCB/NMRAnet bus (if I want a feature-rich bus for the future) or a really dumb serial bus (like S88 or C/MRI). The latter is attractive since I can potentially interface to it with an Arduino, opening up some room for home-brew devices. Of course I could do that with NMRAnet, but today that requires a US$45 shield to add to the Arduino (or one with it built in), which kind of takes away from the appeal of using $10 Arduinos to do things like drive signal masts.
While thinking about this, I went off and started researching what was available commercially or as home-brew circuitry and software libraries for these busses and for doing occupancy detection with them, as the latter would be a good way to get my feet wet and solve my “don’t want to solder those #$@! BDL168s any more” problem.
But in the past week I’ve been sidetracked into looking at homebrew inductive-coil detection circuits.
Read More...
