Giottist

Hi Sandra, I'm working at the same topic (ok, ok, occasional ...). Cosmik42 was so nice and enabled the C# COM Port interface in the BAP software. I'm thinking about a comparable problem to retrieve information about which indiviual train occupies which sector or a track sector is free. From time to time I think at RFID identification or barcodes beneth my locos. Arduinos can read out the sector sensors and send the information to the BAP software via the COM interface. I prefer the Arduino Mega due to its large number of IO ports. At the moment I've just tested the communication between Arduino and BAP. And not to forget to mention I got real help from Cosmik42 by PM. Thanks a lot!

O really? I'll try it and report my results here ! Ok, chinese ball bearings are really cheap (I've bought 140 pcs.), enough to sacrify some ;) Ah: I'm using ball bearings of the MR 52 ZZ type combined with stainless steel axles diameter 2mm h9 40mm length made of alloy 1.2210 (115CrV3), known in Germany as "Silberstahl", both available at Ebay. The axles fit perfectly into the ball bearings. And thank you a lot for the Info for european brickrailroaders

Hmm nice idea, but really expensive for europeans. I had just several struggles with german customs who would not accept, that I imported not illegal LEGO copies ... Do you think about an european distribution branch comparable to 4Dbrix or so? Btw.: The idea to combine ball bearings (recommended type MR 52 RR) with technic bricks is very good, we have just to widen the hole from 4.8 to 5.0 mm with a drilling machine for home use. (Ok Ok, watch on your fingers ...) On the other hand, this is only a solution for die hard brickrailroaders. For the masses it's more recommendable to lubricate the new all plastic wheels with a tiny speck of lithium grease. Please keep in mind the old bogies will die out in the more or less far future.

No problem: It's a matter of minutes to clean up the old dirty grease and replace it with fresh one, using cotton swabs or a soft toothbrush for instance in combination with dish cleaner. The modern ball bearing greases are chemically stabilized. They are based on lithium soaps and not on more or less long and branched alkane molecules. Therefore they can't polymerize and become sticky and hard like old fashioned lubrication fats.

Thats true, but the matching bogie 38339 is not available (now) That's not neccessary. Dedicated lubricants for ball bearings are made of lithium grease but may be cleaner than lubricants for common use. The friction reduction is very similar. The most important property is a rather high viscosity and resistance against dust and moisture. I expect no noticeable difference between the different grease types. The good news is that we can solve the friction problem with minor effort, very little money and most important no mechanical modification of any parts.

New test results for the new wheel design: I lubricated them with a tiny speck of lithium grease: Now they roll down the ramp 20% further than the old design with unlubricated steel axles. The friction is lowered by more than a factor of two. Perhaps this makes any ball bearing unneccesary for general purposes. Ok, lubricated steel axles outperform lubricated plastic axles but the difference ist not so large. Next step will be a test track with a train MOD with four 34 stud wagons on bogeys ... Lithium grease has some advantages above oil: It is water- and dust resistant and it is like temperated butter but not a thin oil spilling around anywhere. I assume I have to clean the wheels from time to time but not frequently. My experience with thin silicon oil is not as good. Addenum: After several dozen tests the performance increases a litte bit, perhaps another 5% and can be compared now with lubricated steel axles. (Original unlubricated steel axles are more than 20% inferior now) It takes some time to build a final thin film of lubricant between the plastic parts. So, with a really tiny speck of lithium fat we can overcome the friction problem with really long or heavy trains. I guess, it won't be a problem for short toy trains anyway.

Another source of information about the other new train ...

Couldn't resist: Smyth toys (former toys'R'us) offers the Hidden side train 30% of and I picked up one to use it as a nice heap of useful parts, i.e. the ramp 53834 Other useful parts are the panels, the slopes, the train front and doors, the chassis 6*24, the handrails and the magnet coupler (ok ok, I have more than 90 pieces of them) and last but not least a lot of parts in dark red, a very useful colour for rolling stock. Even the two bright lime wings are useful to complete the basilisk figure from an old Harry Potter set ... Just tested the new wheels with the really heavy hopper car from set 60098: Same as in the short YT clip, but not as worse. The new axle stops any motion at 2/3 of the distance the old metal axle runs. It seem the new wheels are made of polyethylene and not of ABS, they are more elastic. Since I have now eight axles I like to make experiments with proper lubrication ... A candidate is lithium grease which is water and dust resistant.

What a brilliant idea! What about turned wheels with an integrated ball bearing on an axle cliped into the holder 38339? Let go to the drawing board ...

Ouh, that's as clear as bad. TLG has produced trash to save 5 cents. Happy are those who have bought a heap of axles in the past. Prices will rise. The ID numbers for the new wheels is 38340, for the wheel holder 38339. Only one really usable new part occuresin this set: The ramp with the number 53834.

Cosmik42s BAP is a really nice software and perfect for home use. Its ideal to run the garden LEGO railway. At the moment the lack of an excluding/including function of designated BT devices might be a drawback, but the operation at exhibitions is not a standard case. I'm sure its not to difficult to add such functionality to the software, if Cosmik42 have the time to do this and thre is common demand ... But it has even now really undeniable advantages: First: It's ready to use and available for everybody. Just download, install and use it. We need no special hardware or software, even no more software knowledge than run a Win10 program. And Win10 is a standard on mordern notebooks independent if you like it or not (I for myself do not so much, but I can live with it) Then BAP functionality can be extended by inserting small program blocks in C#, if you have some programming knowledge. I for myself make experients with Arduino communications using the serial port and it works fine. And basic functionality like programming the color sensor for instance can be performed without any programming. A couple of weeks I presented my solution for working signals in this thread .. Of course own hard- and software solutions are undisputable mor satisfiying for the skilled maker. So it#s a matter of personal preference what system you use. I for myself like playing with LEGO parts and like BAP for its readyness.

That's the reason why I subcribed the YouTube channels of Bananenbuurman and yours You brought me back to LEGO trains ...

I agree to legotownlinz. For new layouts plastic rails are the only choice, since the production of 9V stuff ended in 2007. This is 12 years ago. The availability drops and the prices are rising. I for myself came back to LEGO trains in 2015 after decades of dark ages and did not recognize the 9V phase. I miss nothing, even now with bluetooth, sensors and programming. And yes, I know the arguments with limited battery capacity, weak motors and so on, but I'm sure there are and will be a lot of solutions. And I like the new long radius tracks and switches including railyard and triple switches or crossovers ... To be fair, 9V tracks made by enthusiasts have their value: The shiny rails are beautiful, nobody is forced to migrate and of course the remaining users of old 9V parts like to add other matching parts to their layouts. High prices are justified for theese dedicated purposes. It's a matter of the grade of enthusiasm.

Hi zephyr1934 I have some experience with the european branch of Shapeways since I've ordered a heap of wheels there: The parts are printed at Rotterdam in the Netherlands. This is the sender address on the parcels. The printing quality is so so, but far away from precision. The ordinary surface is rather rough and irregular. We can order better surface quality but this will up the price tag rapidly. Premium quality will double it. Shapeways is very expensive and the designer earns nothing. Ask Shupp, he's thinking about to change to another 3D printing service. Nevertheless, Shupp's wheels are phantastic designs as your rods, i.e. in combination If I compare the surface and dimension quality of your rods and Shapeways products, your rods are far better. Before Shapeways rised the prices for dyed parts above the stratosphere, I bought such parts, but it is not worth the money (anymore). Best will be to buy white undyed prints with a better surface finish and dye them by yourself. Best dye for red parts is RAL3020 "traffic red".

Ah, perhaps I misunderstood the maximum number of occupied BT channels is limited to 12 by principle and not only by hardware. On the other hand, I curious about the idea for a work around ...

Please keep in mind that Cosmik42 does his work for free. We can be grateful to him for this altruistic policy. It is really hard for him (more common for all of us!) to foresee any circumstances. He appreciates our feedback, but a neutral report is most useful. I'm sure there will be a solution to select individual hubs and to exclude others. I suggest an assignment of MAC adresses in a droplist to the individual (coloured) hub which can be saved and reloaded. This might be much more flexible than the rigid SBrick solution. Please be fair and regard the number of BT channels are limited at one place. I suggest max 3 channels at exhibitions per exhibitors so four can work in parallel. I just tested it: In the silence of my home there is no issue: My signal program works fine with the sensor at both ports A and B. Did you test it in presence of many other BT devices ?

Hi there, more to report while playing with the Brick Automation Project: Just tried to test the combination of a train motor at port A and the colour sensor at port B to get a signal functionality. The colour sensor looks own with an average distance of 10 mm to the sleepers. Here my true barebone setup: To let stop a train in front of a red signal I put a red strip on the sleepers in some distance. At full speed 50 up to 70 cm are sufficient but I have to do more tests with real heavy trains ... In the programm section BAP software a sensor event is advised to decelerate the train in 500 ms if the colur red is recognized between the rails. The test results are promising. Even at full speed only limited by motor power and the steep radius of original R40 curves 8 stud length for the signal strip is sufficient to be recognized. But only red and white are detected with enough reliability. My wooden flor is to often interpreted as "yellow", blue and green does not work. A signal can be realized by a visible signal either mechanical or by LED in combination with a red signal strip aproximately 50 cm in front of the signal mast. This strip can be turned upside down showing a neutral colour if the main signal shows "go" or green light. Next step will be building the signal in real bricks.

Please, can you explain us the advantage of your system beside unlimited power supply? Keep in mind that LEGO abandoned the 9V system 10 years ago and rails become less available and increasingly expensive with the time. Ok, if you have them ...

Hmm, hard to analyze without any detail information. Can you show us here images of your soldered cables ? In general please regard the following: 1) Before you make any adpater by your own, please be sure you know the pinout of the two plugs (PU on one side, PF on the other) and understand the meaning of each connector pin. 2) Using SATA cable does not seem meaningful for me. Why did you not connected the matching wires together? You need more legth? 3) I can guess only what could happen without any image of your adapter. 4) Did you test your PU hub afterwards without any plugged device or one or two plugged original PU devices wth fresh batteries? If it shows still nothing, uh oh that's a bad sign. In this case your PU hub is electric garbage. Please look at Bricklink for new ones ... 5) An adapter is possible, but you need a bunch of electronic and soldering skills. You have to connect the two output wires from the PU hub (Pin 1 and Pin 2) to the motor pins of PF( Pin 2 and Pin 3), but that's not sufficient. Since the PU hub needs an information what is connected, you have to generate a signal on Pin 5 and 6 of the PU hub. Theese identification pins are missing at the PF pinout. And you have to respect the voltage levels of PF (something between 9 and 7 V on Pin 1 and 4) and of PU (3.3 V (? to verified) on Pin 3 and 4) Hmm, complicated isn't it? Best, Giottist

What a wonderful model - without any doubt. BTW, The original UP 4014 had its roll out last thursday, youtube is full of video clips of that rolling vulcan. Just look for "Big Boy 4014" and enjoy !

11 hubs in parallel? Really? You encourage me to repeat the test with all my 6 hubs and 4 Sbricks ... I assume the limit is the channel number of the used BT controller. Mine is the build in controller of a Gigabyte Brix.

Second test run: Setup: four PUP hubs, all with the colour/distance sensor at Port B and two hubs with train motors at port A and the two other hubs with simple medium motors at port A. LEDs set to green, yellow, red and blue. Result: Each hub runs alone in pairs, in triples or all four together. Each hub can be enabled and disabled individually without any flaw. In all combinations the clour/distance sensors delivered correct and reproducable results. This is equivalent to operate up to four trains at the same time. Conclusion: Absolute functional for sensor controlled multi train operation. That's what we have dreamt of ... The official LEGO app is not able to do this as far as I know. If no severe issue is found, the alpha status can be removed. (Minor) restriction: I can only run test with the actual firmware version of the PUP hub. To be safe just update first the firmware of your hubs.

First and most important: We all are so grateful that you sacrified your evening to solve the motor problem It is a full success! With the PUP hub all kindes of motors (simple medium, train and Boost external) works perfect together with the colour/distance sensor. This is true for the latest version of the PUP hub firmware. Since I've updated all (!) of my PUP hubs I cannot test it with elder versions anymore. I'm convinced elder firmware versions will die out rapidly,so I see no problem. This is important because the small PUP hub fits into a lot of locomotive designs, the Boost hub do not. Now it is possible to combine a sensor with a train or simple medium motor and get a functionality comparable to Duplo. Particular a working signal solution is coming up. I repeated the test with two PUP hubs in parallel. No problems anymore. We are able to run several trains at the same time. Today afternoon I will get more colour/distance sensors bought in the LEGO online shop, then I will test several parallel motor/sensor combinations and post the results here. The move hub works in all configurations. It seems the 1.3 alpha can loose its alpha status very quick. Many many many thanks to you Cosmik42

[Irony] I've found a workaround for the motor issue with the actual PUP hub firmware: Just configure it as light - and you can go forward with full speed and stop - a little bit limited, but it works fine. OK you can't go backwards but hey, go one full loop around. [/Irony] There is another argument not to support old and vanishing firmeware versions anymore. From now on LEGO will sell hubs only with the actual firmware, both as single component or as part of a set. So elder firmware versions will only found in hubs beeing ealier in the free market. And they will become lesser if they meet the app which will update elder versions to the actual one. For programmers of PUP software the situation is not comfortable and somewhat confusing, since up to the hiring of JJ van Oosten as chief digital officer chaos and a lack of communication seemed to rule between the different teams like WeDo, PUP, Boost and so on. The unification has begun since his start in early March. I assume, his first measure was and is the unification of TLGs IT strategy and particular the new BT protocol. I assume all diferences between the different product lines using BT will die out very quick. I recommend to continue only using the actual command codes. Updating old firmware is a matter of minutes and is reasonably.

Hmm, the hubs will update their firmware automatically by switching them on when the original LEGO app is running. After a while the old firmware will be vanish anyway. Do you be convinced the extra work for downward compatibility is worth all the efforts? Up to then we can use only SBricks and the move hub with the BAP software, the motor commands are ignored by all PUP hubs with actual firmware.