Controlling Your Model Railroad with a $10 Raspberry Pi Zero W
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Welcome to the DIY and Digital Railroad. This is a channel all about model railroading, 3D Printing, and arduinos. Today I am going over using the Raspberry Pi Zero W as a controller for a DCC Model Railroad through JMRI. This is an easy and inexpensive way to get JMRI active on your model railroad for computer control! Model Trains and Model Railroading is such an amazing hobby. Let’s share it together!
The price since making this Video has gone up to $20
Raspberry Pi Zero W
amzn.to/3ltRXJR
Zero W with starter kit
amzn.to/3dcpxkN
Raspberry Pi 3 Alternative
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Raspberry Pi 3 Kit
amzn.to/3de3Alj
JMRI
www.jmri.org/
I do a lot of 3D Printing. Here are some great printers
Anycubic Photon
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Creality Ender 3
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Camera I use
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connect with me at drrcommunity@gmail.com
“The godly may trip seven times, but they will get up again.
But one disaster is enough to overthrow the wicked.
Don’t rejoice when your enemies fall;
don’t be happy when they stumble.
For the Lord will be displeased with you
and will turn his anger away from them.
Don’t fret because of evildoers;
don’t envy the wicked.”
Proverbs 24: 16-19 NLT - แนวปฏิบัติและการใช้ชีวิต
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Great video! I plan to use a similar setup for a layout I'm building, so your videos are a useful bit of insight into how the setup might work. I'm looking forward to the rest of this series!
Keep it cheep and simple love it.
excellent step by step easy to follow instructions.. awesome Jimmy..awesome. I've always been fascinated by people who have a great understanding about electronics.. You have a great handle on it. Thank you for sharing that knowledge in an easy to follow format.
Well that seemed easy enough. I would have to go back and hit the pause button after each step though. I'll be staying tuned in for the rest of this series. Thanks Jimmy! Cheers, Dan
Thanks for the demo and the great channel on digital model railroading. Question, why not extract directly to the Opt folder? Linux thing? I have a Pi, and a DCC++ arduino base station, but the Pi is not being used right now. Any advantage to running JMRI separately on a light PC versus my workstation?
hi Jimmy... that is an awesome little gadget ... i am having issues with my JMRI maybe i should look into this a little further.. thanks for sharing... vinny
Very interesting will watch for future updates . Thanks.
captainbaldo mike Thank you! Be sure to subscribe if you haven't already. I'm doing a giveaway tomorrow!
Have been a while, good information. Please keep it up.👍🚂
i am new to all of this! would a second motor board and power supply; be like a boost, and power a seconed zone?
Hi I’m thinking about doing a Rasbury pie or my dad’s Army Warmington on C layout n gage can you use the Rasbury pie on DC And doc trains and hook it up to a lap top need help
Great video, this should eliminate the notebook from my layout. Thanks
Hey great video series, LOVE IT!!!I drinking boring plain old Folgers classic roast in the Keureg , black with 2 sugars 😁
Hi Jimmy i
am beginner and question to run locomotive still need uno and raspberry or only raspberry
I wonder if I could use JMRI with Blue Rail (say for subway/Passenger and freight trains) the reason for this is because I'm building the entire planet in G scale (while using O scale for other countries along with G scale).
Does the sd card come wi Th it also is it a regular sd card or a micro
Hello, i tried to install JMRI on my new raspberry pi w zero. I think that I have problem with Java. System is giving me error when I ask about which version of java is installed on raspberry. I am running last version of raspbian. how can i solve the probelm?
Hi, I tried this and it isn't working the error I get is:. Error occurred during initialization of VM Server VM is only supported on ARMv7+ VFP. Would you run the cat /proc/cpuinfo command from the command prompt to see if I just got an old Zero W. I would like to know
Thanks
Thanks for publishing. I hadn't seen a Pi 0W before this. For those of us who watched over smaller screens like cellphones and tablets, it would be significantly more helpful if you could narrate the web screens you visit, such as JMRI, and when you are doing keystrokes they cannot be seen, such as, right clicking on the Raspberry, select the option, blank, then I am right clicking.... etc. It helps the follow along without the aid of a magnifying glass!
Jimmy, what is required to connect a serial to usb cable from a NCE power pro to the pi? Do you need a driver?
bob
Here is the device to hookup an NCE system to any computer to the pi if you don't already have it. amzn.to/2r2qVPS
You will need a driver from the NCE website for that
If you already have this. then you don't need anything to hook it up to a regular raspberry pi except a USB cable.
If you are using a raspberry pi zero or zero w, then you need a mini usb hub like the one that I mentioned in the video.
Here is a link.
amzn.to/2DVcHIW
Raspberry pi is awesome, I have 2 atm. I'm just getting into model railroading. Cool to see you can use raspberry pi to control it
Do remember however you will still require hardware to interface between the model railroad and the pi ! you can use existing systems such as digitrax or lenz etc or you can build your own DCC command station from an arduino and motor shield that can be used with JMRI :)
Hello. How are you using USB to connect to your layout?
DCC++ on an Arduino
Jimmy, just found your site after seeing you in chat on Steve Brown's channel. This is great info. I have an old laptop that I have thought about putting a different hard drive into and loading LINUX on that for a lot of this same stuff. I wouldn't need to load Raspberry Pi, but some other version of LINUX, then would everything pretty much be the same? This is really cool, I am a techie, so anytime you get a computer involved, it gets me excited! Looking forward to the upcoming videos in the series!!! -Mike
The Main a-TRACK-tion Thank you!
If the laptop can run windows sufficiently then dont bother installing linux however if it is old and runs windows slow then just install something like ubuntu on the laptop instead :) the rest of the setup is the same, as I mentioned above to another user do however be aware the pi or laptop alone can not interface with the railroad and will require some form of interface between the computer and the track such as a existing DCC system that can be used with JMRI or you can build a cheap DIY interface which is sufficiently decent for around $30 with an arduino uno and a motor shield for the uno !
Errrr ...... I'm glad you know what you were doing. Yeeeesh! If I knew what JMRI was that might have helped .... :-(
G'Dya Jimmy, I have been using JMRI and Raspberry Pi devices for train control. Check out this video on my channel using the SPROG DCC board. A little simpler that the DCC++ as it is all in one box. Anyhow great video I will be waiting for some more.
I've got another question about JMRI on the Raspberry Pi Zero W. Does the system ever get bogged down and start lagging? I'm using the Engine Driver app on my Android phone, and sometimes I'll start of stop a train, and the train doesn't react for a minute or two. Usually restarting JMRI will fix it for a while. I'm wondering if the Pi Zero just doesn't have the resources to run the software as well as it should, and if a regular Raspberry Pi would work better.
I would guess that a computer with more ram would fix the issue. Raspberry Pi 3 and 4 are almost as fast as a standard desktop. Your lag should be a couple seconds at the most, not a couple minutes.
Also works with rocrail.
Hi, I am missing something here. How do you get JMRI from the internet to the raspberry pi.? Where are you down loading to? The SD card? How do you get from your download folder on your pc internet connected unit over to the pi? Bob
The Raspberry Pi Zero W has Wifi. Once you put your wifi username and password, your raspberry Pi will be connected to the internet. The wifi icon is in the top right of the raspberry pi desktop. You shouldn't need to use another computer to download JMRI. I hope this helps!
Not sure what you mean by username and password. Will the wifi app ask you for the password of your router? Is it like linking an iphone? Does the pi have its own browser? Can you be a little more specific please, thanks. bob
+Robert Schworm That is correct. It is like linking an iphone. There is a wifi icon in the top right of the raspberry pi screen when it boots up. It looks kind of like a fan. You click that and you select tge wifi network you want to connect to.
Last question. How do you print out JMRI settings thru the pi? what is required for drivers? After I configure JMRI, I would like to document it. bob
How do you connect the pi to the rails? Did I miss that?
You still need to connect the Pi to a DCC controller to convert the signals from the Raspberry Pi to DCC. There are plenty of tutorials on doing this. The cheapest and easiest way to do this is using an Arduino, motor controller and DCC++. For less than $20 you get yourself a DCC controller, and with the Pi the combo works very well.
At some point, you have to connect to wifi. Is this part of the installation process?
+Playing With Trains The Raspberry Pi Zero W has a pretty straight forward wifi setup. There is an icon in the top right of the desktop.
I followed your guides to get my own DCC++ system up and running, and I'm using a Pi Zero W to run JMRI. I'm running my Pi headless now that it's set up, but that leaves me with the problem of shutting it down when I'm done running trains. Do you leave things on all the time, log in to shut down the Pi, or just switch off the power? I've been logging in over SSH to shut down the Pi, but I don't want to do that all the time if I don't have to.
I have my entire layout run through one power strip and I use that as an on/off switch. I ran mine with a screen so I was able to shut the Pi down that way, but even though it's not the best practice, I will just flip the switch on the power strip and shut it down that way too. I have not had any problems.
@@DIYDigitalRailroad Thanks for the reply. The Pi is a bit more forgiving than larger computers when it comes to just killing the power. I guess I could get brave and solder some wires to the GPIO headers and wire up a button to shut it down. I've seen plenty of tutorials on how to do that.
I am unable to get a Raspberry pi Zero to work with JMRI I get the error "unable to start VM machine" do you have any ideas?
Hello, I have tried this with two different Raspberry pis and I continue to get the same error "error starting VM Machine" it does work on my Raspberry Pi 4 with no problems? How can I get this to work??
I get the same error. Were you able to resolve?
@@darinv1679 No unfortunately I haven't, DIY hasn't responded to many attempts for assistance.. Hopefully they will.
You appear not to have Java installed to run the JMRI App which is installed with the full desktop version of Raspberry OS. I’m also not having much luck getting JMRI running on the Pi Zero W, but runs easily on the Pi 4 2Gb version using the pre configured download for the Pi thanks to Steve Todd. mstevetodd.com/jmri-raspberrypi-access-point
@@richardh3675 I did verify that Java was installed. Jimmy still has yet to respond?
Can you use a laptop
I'd suggest using "mv" to move the JMRI folder rather than "cp" to copy it.
Chris White Great idea! Thanks for the tip!
Looks more like installing JMRI than controlling your railroad. I want to see how it works what it does not how to install it .
Current price is 33 bucks
Not as useful as I’d expected.