Taunton Model Engineers are working on designing and building a signalling system.
How are we doing? Here's a progress report - Signalling - A system design for Safety, Flexibility, Simplicity. Published Jan 2024, Updated Apr 2024.
These pages are to contain every detail of the design and build as it progresses, 'Open Sourcing' offers the hope that others will be able to inspect and understand all aspects of the design and construction, and to get involved themselves.
Update March 2024 -
The West Buckland site remains a mud-fest, meaning progress installing hard signalling infrastucture lags behind the detailed electronic and software system design, now nearing completion. Controllers, LED signals and communication networks have been designed, built and tested, seen to be working "on the bench".
Work continues in other technical areas including actuation methods and train detection sub-systems.
From the outset, development of the signalling system has been guided by three Cardinal Objectives : -
Cost considerations, while important, will not be permitted to compromise the above.
On this scale a railway signalling system may be modelled as a simple digital system incorporating multiple Boolean inputs and outputs. This has been implemented using a number of low-cost, British designed ARM Cortex 32 bit microcontrollers from S T Microelectronics. Code has been written and developed using the free "STM32CubeIDE" from S T.
Anyone aspiring to further develop or modify any of the software or firmware need only install STM32CubeIDE and find the relevant code files here. (Other software development suites and IDEs are available.)
In line with Cardinal Objectives, two methods of interconnecting system components have been provided : -
The former is best suited to the Level Crossing, where many switches and actuators are located physically close to the signal box.
CAN bus, the Controller Area Network, facilitates daisy-chaining numerous more distant nodes using the same 4 wires.
All design files of ANY type, and absolutely everything to do with the signalling system will be found here.
Latest Update March 2024. Forever a Work In Progress.
Taunton Model Engineers [web]
Ask J.F about joining the team of 'collaborators'. It's not too difficult, it goes like this :
For the basics of using 'GitHub', see loads of help and tutorials on Youtube.