Model Railroading Uses

Community Playground General Discussions
1

Please tell me:

(1) If MiCasaVerde products are possible to use for Model Railroading.

(2) Could Model Railroad together with other rolling items be ‘internetized’ with MiCasaVerde Vera and VistaCam products.

(3) This facility (2) given access to not just the registered user and instead anyone on the internet could avail the opportunity i.e. various users?

2

I’m a little confused about what exactly you are trying to do. However, it seems like you want to set up Vera so that a model railroad set can be controlled remotely by any number of people and viewed with webcams?

I think you could set up some model railroading control with Vera. You would probably need to control a bunch of relays to change your rail switches and route the rail traffic. There are some options to do this with Vera:

http://code.mios.com/trac/mios_iorelay

I’m not sure how you would provide speed control…

Is this for a railroad club? I hate to say this because I love the vera but you might be better going with something else if you only want to control a model railroad. People in that hobby have come up with a lot of projects to provide exactly what you are talking about. Here is just one option:

http://srcpd.sourceforge.net/

3

Hi there,

I am both a model railroader and a house automation geek. But frankly, I don’t think Vera (or z-wave in general) can be very helpful.

Personally, the only link between my model railroad and Vera is the layout power is switch ON/OFF (and measured) by a Qees switch.

What you could do, is use cams to show the layout online. But there are much easier solutions out there, and I wouldn’t advise using Vera for non-home surveillance purposes (Vera seems to do it well, but way to hard to just display a live stream online).

There are many software offers, hardware options that would allow to control a DCC layout from the internet with a bit of DIY, but still less than with Vera! (See Rocrail, Jmri…), but any further talk is out of the scope of this Micasaverde forum.

Pierre

4

So to answer your questions:

  1. Everything is possible with Vera, that’s the beauty of it…but is it the best solution for everything, surely not!

  2. I’m not sure Vera can stream cameras live online, many other simpler solutions exist. As for controlling the layout, use standard DCC equipment and server based train control software, it will be much easier!

  3. You wouldn’t want to give access to your home control to anyone online anyway, so this is a bad idea through Vera.