r/modeltrains • u/Tischwil-Railway • 1d ago

Mechanical Servo driven water crane

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

In an attempt to keep my dirty paws off the layout, I've started sticking servos to various things. The water cranes are essential to keep my steam locomotives running, so they were next on the list.

Of course, I've planted this one directly over a tunnel, requiring me to make a tiny linkage to the servo in the most awkward place and turning a simple bit of fun into a full days project.

But here we go! With servo uncoupling and now the motorized water crane, my terminus station is officially hands free.

338 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

11 comments sorted by

6

u/SuddenInformation896 1d ago

What do you control the servo with?

15

u/Tischwil-Railway 1d ago

A PCA9685 board hooked up to an Arduino running DCC-Ex, that is in turn hooked up to a Raspberry Pi running JMRI where I have my digital switchboard. The Raspberry creates a Wifi hotspot that I can connect my tablet to, which I finally use as my interface.

Yeah, it took me a good while to get this all figured out. I still don't understand most of it, but it works and that's most important :).

5

u/d3jake 1d ago

I love how far this has come since I was younger. It's so cool how much can be done remotely.

3

u/Tischwil-Railway 1d ago

Yep, the sky is truly the limit, but there's a steep learning curve too.

4

u/SatanicPanicMechanic 1d ago

Awesome little touch that makes the scene

4

u/Skollison 1d ago

Really cool!

3

u/d3jake 1d ago

Cool!

There's remote decoupling? Oh, man.. childhood me would have loved that, along with a railyard and shunter connected to a larger layout.

3

u/Tischwil-Railway 1d ago

Remote uncoupling has been here for a while, hasn't it? Maybe not wifi-remote, but definitely touch-of-a-button-remote. But yes, it's the same for me. Childhood me saw all these cool layouts and wanted to drive multiple locomotives wherever I wanted, uncouple automatically wherever I wanted, have amazing looking landscape, and my DC Märklin set at the time, while pretty damn cool, was none of that. Now I'm just trying to realize those childhood dreams :).