I put together a bench test for using panels in JMRI to control Sunset Valley pneumatic switch machines through LCC. Here’s a little video demo:

Very impressive. Where you planning to house the control system?

so, you are battery right? So you will run the CAN bus to the various “areas” where you need to control solenoids? I grouped mine into 3 locations, preferring longer air lines to longer wires and more locations.

Has anyone ever considered sharing the LCC CAN bus with other CAN bus systems? (my Zimo uses the CAN bus).

Nice setup, easy with off the shelf components. I guess there was no way to have enough power from the CAN bus to power the solenoids, so you must run power and the CAN bus to each “group” of solenoids.

Also, did you consider/evaluate any other LCC hardware?

Thanks for sharing, Greg

I’m not running any track power, so LCC is a perfect solution for controlling everything else. I hope to add signals down the road. I will have the electronics either in the house or shed or some waterproof container at various central points, and run the CAN bus between them. I have conduit to the shed for this purpose. I’m going to use the same strategy of having 2 or 3 centralized locations and long air hoses.

I don’t see any reason that the CAN bus couldn’t be shared, provided that the data rate is the same and the the individual systems use unique message IDs. One of the great things about LCC is that each node produced has a unique ID and generates unique messages, so there is no danger of overlap if nodes are moved from system to system. Adding non-LCC components would potentially compromise this, so I’m not sure it’s really worth the trouble.

Each solenoid draws about 75 mA, and the LCC power point only supplies 500, so it’s not practical to supply power over the bus using standard-compliant hardware.

There really isn’t any other LCC hardware at this point. I’ll probably build some of my own, though. I have a block of addresses assigned to me.

Looks like fun, and recently I have been getting a lot of requests for automation solutions, and I’m looking for a good JMRI-based one, so this looks good.

Have you seen many LCC stationary decoders yet?

Greg

I think this one that I’m using is the only stationary decoder on the market. They also have a signal decoder.

Way to heavy/in depth for me Eric but very cool ! Still like the Amtrash car reader video you did awhile back.

Greg Elmassian said:

Has anyone ever considered sharing the LCC CAN bus with other CAN bus systems? (my Zimo uses the CAN bus).

Greg: this question has been on my mind, and I finally had a chance to test it out. I hooked a Linux machine up to the LCC bus using a generic CAN-USB interface (I use these for car hacking) and fuzzed the bus with random CAN frames. The LCC communication still worked fine. LCC frames use extended (29-bit) arbitration IDs, so I think if you dump standard 11-bit ID frames onto the bus, there won’t be any chance of duplicating a valid LCC message.

The only real limitation is the bus speed. LCC operates at 125 kbps. There are several other standard CAN bus speeds, so you’d have to find out what Zimo or whatever else uses.

I just wanna know which Can Bus I should interface with to the micro brewery on Eric’s layout. I found the pizza oven line so that is a good start for me anyway!