Milestones
Overview
Introduction
Here is my journey in developing RTB infrastructure.
It started with an LED decoder for passenger cars, which then moved on to the development of my DCC/Railcom logger. Once that was stable, I looked for a way to generate the DCC command flow myself. This was the starting point of the RTB project, which has now reached considerable size.
See also my prototypes blog.
Big picture
Why a new bus?
Existing bus specifications (that I knew of) did not meet my needs for fast, reliable, low latency communication. In particular, the bus latency was not sufficient for my expected use cases, because I wanted to generate the DCC commands real-time on the PC. Therefore, a new bus design was required.
Today the new bus, I call it RTB (Real-Time Bus), was successfully developed and has been running stably since 2021. The bus is specifically tailored to DCC environments.
Who should be interested?
- hobby enthusiast who wants to monitor DCC/Railcom traffic
- developers who need to pursue DCC/Railcom
- people who use modular layouts
About the bus
- conceptually there is no scalability limit. The compute power of the central object server (PC) defines the limit.
- the debugging/logging features are second to none
- real-time DCC/Railcom tracking
- continuous time recording
- post-mortem analysis
- do-it-yourself hardware can be integrated (e.g. Arduino or Qwiic)
- finely tuned components for flexibility with modular layouts
- low costs
- DCC protocol extension
- automatic layout discovery
- tailored for the N scale (which I use)
Design drivers
- easy to use
- plug and play
- firmware update everywhere
- data processing on the PC
- optimized for modular layouts
- affordable
- expandable with do-it-yourself HW/SW
- programming APIs
Milestones
This project started back in 2019 and is in progress. It is intended solely for hobby purposes and has motivating ups and downs. Below are some bullet points of what I have already implemented so far.
- high speed layout control bus
- layout control devices
- DCC mobile decoders with Railcom
- modular control panel devices (CTC)
- Management software stack on the PC
- started working on a GUI
