Raspberry Pi Uses In Model Railroading

General
1

In the Arduino thread, Woke_Hoagland brought up the Raspberry Pi in connection with model railroading. And I was wondering, has anyone here used a Pi to do model train whatnots? Most of my work with them lately has centered around (1) controlling my 3D printers and (2) hooking up a home-jiggered streaming system. But I did get the idea of maybe using a Pico to control power districts on my railroad…
So does anybody else got some ideas, or, better yet, anything they’ve tried?

2

I use Apple’s offerings. However, I’ve heard of folks running XTrackCAD on a Raspberry Pi.

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3

I’ve been looking into using a Pi Pico as the driver for a PWM throttle for DC power. Instead of having a couple of throttles and switches or relays to select blocks, the Pico’s and H-bridge motor driver IC’s are cheap enough for each block to have its own throttle.

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4

Sure!

That would definitely be doable!

5

I use a Pi 5 8G with an M.2 SSD hard drive on a PCIe extender as my main computer for running JMRI. It’s used for both LCC programming and debugging and DCC decoder programming. It’s connected to my LCC network, NCE Power Pro DCC system, and DCC-Ex DCC system via USB. Works really well, is very small, the case with the Pi, extender and SSD is something like 6"x4"x2", and quiet. At some point I will likely create an JMRI panel to display blocks and signals and the Pi will be running that too.

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6

Now that’s fancy!

7

We use the PI with JMRI To run our N Scale layout. With it’s WIFI , we control trains with our phones.

8

Nice!
It looks like a lot of folks use it to run JMRI.

9

Yup, depending on your use case, running JMRI on a Pi can make a lot of sense. The topic comes up quite often on jmriusers.

So much so, in fact, that one of the JMRI developers takes the time to make available a Pi image with JMRI pre-installed and configured to detect and use your specific DCC connection. (See the link I posted in the Arduino thread that Engine_1988 linked to above)

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The only reason I’m not doing so myself is because I have an outdated but otherwise perfectly wonderful Windows 7 PC that I just don’t want to sit around and I don’t use JMRI that much…