niveth

I think I have come across this video. Yes, you are correct, they are way cheaper, I even have a lot of arduino esp boards lying around from my university final year project(home automation project(2016)) LEGO made me get back to all of this and made it easy. I will make sure to look into this further. Thanks again and I've followed you back! Thank you, sir!

The ESP boards may require 3.3 or 5V to function and the hub with rechargeable batteries will output between 7-8V. You can use maybe 3 or 4 batteries from the hub to power it, but that will deplete the selected batteries faster and it will damage the overall performance and the batteries during charging. What I'd suggest is using a DC-DC 5V converter/regulator and wire it to the batteries directly(this will have the ESP on standby and will slowly drain the battery) or you can wire it to come from within the hub, so only when the hub is turned on, the ESP will turn on. Yes, ESP 8266/32(Wi-Fi) has good range and is much more reliable compared to Bluetooth. I use them for my ARGB stuff, but not with LEGO as of now. I'm anyway planning to use the hubs themselves and automate the trains and track switches, as I can program them through Pybricks and have them communicate with each other. I'm still in the early phase and I have yet to see how reliable they are. I might even switch to an ESP/Wemos D1 mini board in the future, but let's see :D

Hey! So I use AAA batteries, no modification to the battery compartment. Toshiba AAA 950mAh x 6 batteries. Charging current should be 0.1A (1/10C)

For the past couple of months, I have been working on a solution to charge my train without having to remove the batteries every time. My train layout is close to the ceiling and goes around my wall, so I had the additional trouble of getting up on a ladder every time. I redesigned the LEGO Express Passenger train to accommodate a pantograph with electrical terminals, and I also built a charging station for the train to dock and charge. I'm planning on automating the entire process by charging the battery when it is low and having multiple trains run on their own, in any direction, when switched on. I have documented everything and explained why I haven't considered using the 9V system in my blog, please do check it out, drop a LIKE, and SUBSCRIBE! Link to the blog: https://medium.com/@niveth/building-a-lego-train-pantograph-and-charging-station-with-the-powered-up-system-803f097f1493 You can find the design in action here: You can also find the detailed build video here: