Today, in the fifth episode of my tutorial about controlling a digital model railway with Arduino, let’s learn together how to connect Arduino to the Loconet bus.
As the complexity and size of railway models increased, it was soon realized that what the DCC standard offered was not enough. In order to manage throttles, computers, sensors, control panels… various manufacturers have developed and proposed their own communication buses.
One of the most popular solutions – and the one supported by my digital command station – is the Loconet bus, from the American company Digitrax.
To connect the Arduino to this bus, an interface is required. I designed both a shield and a stand-alone board: all the files needed to build them are available in a Github repository.
In the following videotutorial we will learn together how the Loconet bus works and how to develop Arduino sketches to “talk” with other devices connected to the bus … enjoy!
Ottimo articolo, come sempre!
grazie mille Antonino!
Hello
a nice project! I would like to build it ! which resistors should i use? How many watts ?
greetings
Harald
Thanks! It really doesn’t matter, I normally use 1% 1/4W (the most common ones nowadays)
Hello,
I have followed your tutorial and build the loconet board conntected to an arduino UNO.
but your arduino sketch doesn’t work with my intellibox.
When I push the button it moves the turnout on the intellibox screen, but the turnout doesn’t move. (I have tried with my other digital station DR5000, vitually the turnout moves, but physically nothing happens…
Then I have tried the sketch provided with the loconet library (loconet control simple demo from John Plocher), and this one works, I can move the turnout and get the status. It says in this sketch that some decoder needs digitrax signal to be emulated… Maybe there is the problem ?
I don’t know if you can help
You can see my tests on my blog
http://letraindejembi.canalblog.com/archives/2022/09/18/39634693.html
Greetings Jean-Paul
Hi Jean-Paul, did you build the LnControlPanel board? I should have solved the “incompatibility” with Digitrax signal… please use the latest firmware on Github and let me know