​Two years and five months ago, I managed to control a Tomytec bus by using an electromagnet under the road. I am now happy to report that I have finally been able to move the modules of the main street, bus interchange and Iwasehama station to the layout. All the wires for the bus control blocks, the hundreds of LED lights, the signals and the tracks are connected and everything seems to work fine. Well, not everything. There are still so many things to improve. These buses sometimes seem to have a mind of their own!
Next (major) step: finish the tram layout, and make sure that trams and buses don't collide! For that, I'll have to teach the Raspberry Pi Python application controlling the buses to talk to Rocrail! Interesting challenge.

​- TFT display is 320x240 (240x320 portrait) ILI9341
- I use fbtft_device to drive the display
- The video is a h.264 mp4 file played by mplayer

​Hardware components used:
* ESP32 (Lolin32) with 4BM Flash memory
* Tourist Information: 0.96" 80x160 RGB IPS display with ST7735 driver (only the top 80x80 pixels are used and visible)
  
  Connections:
  DISPLAY      ESP32
  --------------------
  GND            GND
  VCC             V3
  SCL             SCL       (SPI Clock)
  SDA            MOSI     (SPI Data (to slave))
  RES            GPIO4    (Reset)
  DC              GPIO2    (Data/Command)
  CS              SS/5      (Chip Select)
  BLK            GPIO15

Uploading files to the ESP32 flash:
Install ESP32 Filesystem Uploader in Arduino IDE
https://randomnerdtutorials.com/install-esp32-filesystem-uploader-arduino-ide/
https://github.com/me-no-dev/arduino-esp32fs-plugin/releases/

The size of the ESP32 SPIFFS partition can be set in the IDE as 1Mbyte or 3Mbytes.

Place the video/image files inside the sketch folder, in a folder called "Data".  Then upload all the files in the folder using the Arduino IDE "ESP32 Sketch Data Upload" option in the "Tools" menu.
​
The sketch loads
- an 80x80 pixel background image (back.jpeg) once at the beginning
- a sequence of up to one thousand 40x80 images (videoNNN.jpeg) stored in the built-in flash memory.
  
The videoNNN.jpeg files are built as follows:
- Scale and crop the source video to 40x80 (portrait) with Handbrake
- Extract the .jpeg files with ffmpeg:
    ./ffmpeg -i video.mp4 -s 40x80 -r 10 video%03d.jpeg

Trying to fit 0402 LEDs into Kato 23-214 traffic lights. It works, but I am just going to install one LED (either green or red) in each signal.

​This is where the bus guide wire crosses the tram track:

​Next step: the bus interchange. I have built a switch for the bus: a servo motor moves the guide wire towards one of the two positions.

​It works 🙂 

Today, I have started the integration of the system into the python application that runs on the raspberry pi (the same one that controls all the LEDs on the layout).
I have added a screen to control the busses, it looks like that:

Each bus block is a white rectangle. The block is highlighted

• in red if there is a bus arriving or stopped inside
• in yellow if the bus inside has stopped because of a traffic jam
• in green if the bus is departing

For bus blocks that are bus stops, there is a timer that shows how long the bus will stop there.
The application makes sure that there is no collision. The video below shows the results of very the first test:

For more than a year now I am trying to control the Tomytec busses (fitted with a BM-01, BM-02 or BM-03 motor). My ultimate goal is to make the street at the centre of my layout look like this:

There will be

• Two bus lanes (one in each direction), with busses following each other and queuing at the bus stops and traffic lights.
• Two car lanes, with all cars stopped because of the traffic.
• The tram lane at the middle.

I have made significant progress in the past weeks and I am now able to

• reliably detect the busses using hall sensors (placed just below the guiding wire)
• stop the busses using electromagnets on the right side of the guide wire (the Tomytec busses detect the magnetic field and stop until it is switched off).

Under the bus lane, I will place “bus block” control units (I have built twenty of them so far) wherever I want the bus to (potentially) stop. This is what two bus blocks look like (seen from the bottom):

They will all be connected to a Raspberry Pi, which will be able to control the traffic flow.
All of this is still under development, but this weekend I have been able to connect eight bus blocks, and this is the result (that I find really encouraging):

I changed the "sky" lighting to two rows of individually-controllable RGB+Natural White LEDs.

• I am very happy with the Natural White color choice. The light is not as blue as cool white, and not as yellowish as warm white.
• Using individually-controllable SK6812 LEDs means that the color of each LED can be set separately. They are controlled by an Arduino (or similar) microcontroller. Although I currently do not use this feature, it has been very easy to set up.

The bus stops when the electromagnet is powered, then restarts when I switch off the power supply.

Today I tested the signs and ceiling lights of the Shin-Yukari station entrance hall.

To make lighted sign boards, I glued together six square white LEDs (connected as two groups of three), then added a thin styrene sheet before pasting the signs.

This is the very first version of my lighting controller. It is based on a Raspberry Pi and several Adafruit 16-Channel PWM / Servo HAT modules. I will eventually not use these modules (see future posts about my lighting controller).