foreign
[Music]
we're on to our last block of
presentations for this afternoon and it
is my pleasure to Welcome to the stage
Paul Antoine Paul is a second generation
programmer and hacker in many dimensions
including technology startups management
and mental health Paul's open source
contributions are in embedded Computing
firmware and operating systems
development today Paul is going to speak
on an open source standard for
controlling model railroads and I'll
just draw your attention to the fact
that there's been a tiny program change
so we are listening from Paul now and
later that will be followed up by Dan
Shearer so please join me in welcoming
Paul to the stage welcome Paul
thank you Amy
Roman jika welcome everyone
I would like to begin by acknowledging
the wurundry Warren people of the
cooling Nations and traditional
custodians as lambs of Nam otherwise
known as Melbourne but I also want to
extend that acknowledgment to the
traditional custodians of the lands you
are from
I pay my respect to the elders past and
present I would also like to welcome and
extend my respects to any First Nations
peoples attending today
uh
so I
this morning's uh keynote by Hugh really
struck a chord because like him I have
come to the conclusion that many of my
mental health struggles May in fact have
been due to ADHD so you'll pardon me if
this is a little fragmented in places
because I haven't spoken for 15 years
and
my ADHD really kicked in doing this
all right some first some model Railway
ground rules
no model Railways are not toys
most of them are models some of them
extremely detailed and very
sophisticated in how they work and
nowadays they can be full of
microprocessors and software
no not all model railroaders are Sheldon
Cooper types um though some of us are
and no you may not say choo choo every
time you see a train see
a train or hear mention of model
Railways if only I could tell my
partners not to do this
so my model Railway history
spans a long time I became a Model
Railroader at age 10 when my father
who's in the audience here bought me my
first model model train set
and then became an interested in
electronics and and then programming
when I was 13 12 and 13. and now all
three of them have collided so I'm
working on an open source project that
requires electronics and software and
joyfully involves model trains
I joined the Fremantle and districts
model Railway Club when I was 13 in 1977
and
met two of my most significant mentors
life mentors there
both of them actually made this layout
you can see in the image
and I was fortunate enough to be able to
buy that from the club when it was no
longer required so that's now mine
um you'll be interested to know that
that that layout is fully automated it
can run up to 25 trains at once
the automation used in this is a good
chunk of the dweller dwelling up
telephone exchange
it turns out no I'm serious
um the club was was given the relay
boxes that ran the old dwelling up uh
telephone exchange in in the south of
Western Australia
um
I gather some of our members were
actually Telecom technicians and they
happened to know that this was going to
scrap and so on
so all the Automation in here all the
locomotive detection on the tracks and
what have you use is these 48 volt
relays and they're sophisticated State
machine that uses the the the old
dialing relay sets
and um and all these trains run
completely automatically for hours and
hours because one of the ways the club
made money
was to take this to shopping centers and
want everyone take gold donations and
the shopping center would actually pay
for us to turn up during school holidays
and the like so this thing had to be
incredibly reliable and it turns out the
Aur relay boxes were pretty reliable
because they used to run the telephones
so as you've seen from my layout
um modern Railways can be very complex
this one is Rod Stewart's
the singer Rod Stewart
has a massive layout
140 square meters of it which he which
he had built and his passion is building
all the buildings so every single
building in the background there and all
the buildings in the foreground are
things that he personally built from
scratch
because that's the aspect of the model
Railway
uh hobby that he likes the nice thing
about model Railway
is really is one of the very early maker
Style
environments you could follow whichever
part of the passion that you wanted do
you like laying track do you like
running the trains are you interested in
the electronics that drives the trains
or maybe you like building buildings
maybe you like creating scenes it was
very maker oriented well before maker
became
um anything like the term it has become
now
so
in a layout of this complexity there are
lots of opportunities for adding realism
you can make the trains run
automatically as we did for our club
layout
but you can also change the way the
lights work you can some people have
gone to a lot of trouble to create
scenes so you know it goes from dusk to
night time and back to Dawn
and all of that automation used to
happen with very basic transistor Style
um circuits
um back in the old days
and
circuits like this one here this this
one's actually a throttle but you get
the idea they used op amps and scrs and
transistors old style semiconductors
and there is a strong Sharing and open
Hardware sharing of these circuits
amongst modern railroaders so if you had
a circuit that you developed that would
flash the lights on a railway Crossing
you'd publish that in a magazine or hand
it around the club and other people
would build that circuit so they could
put it on their layout so in fact open
Hardware was also something that was in
model railroading from the very earliest
of days
now
modern microcontrollers have become so
cheap so affordable and indeed so
accessible
that they've come to start to replace
transistors and op amps and what have
you in circuits and it allows you to do
far more complex things
but the interesting thing is that that
same sharing of
of designs Hardware Designs and indeed
now
software has become has simply the model
railroading Community is simply adopted
immediately so once there are arduinos
and people start writing a script a
script say to detect tray and light up
the crossing lights and blink the lights
instead of using one of these sorts of
circuits
they then shared that Arduino sketch
with all of the people on the in the
club and what have you
so in fact open source has been the
thing
an open Hardware have been a thing in
the modern railroading Community for a
very long time
so
simpler model railroads are a basic loop
as you can see here
and you put a locomotive and train on
one of those and run it around
and the the earlier forms of control
basically lets you run one train easily
on either of those layouts maybe two if
you wired it up cleverly
but now that you can put a
microprocessor inside a locomotive
you can actually put
20 locomotives on this layout and then
tell locomotive number 35 to move
or turn on its lights
oops there we go
so the basic way a bottle of Railway
motor locomotive works is that
you apply voltage to the rails the rails
send the voltage up via the metal wheels
into the locomotive and it has a motor
as you can see there with gears
and then if you alter the voltage on the
rails the motor speeds up and slows down
if you switch the polarity it'll go
backwards and forwards
but if you put a microprocessor in there
you can now send a protocol across those
rails you can send it packets to tell it
what to do
and if
you've got lights on the locomotive you
can say well turn on the headlight at
the front or the headlight at the back
or when I switch Direction change the
one at the front from
the headlight to the red running lights
and do the same at the back
now turns out if you have a sufficiently
powerful
microprocessor in there with a digital
signal processing capability you can put
sound in there
and and you I can't I should have
actually tried to record this for you
but one of my locomotives has a startup
sequence you press a button saying start
the Loco into steam Loco and the sound
effects you hear are the crunching of
the footsteps of the engineer as he
heads to logo you hear him climb into
the cab you hear him start turning
valves
[Laughter]
yes the sound has become very
sophisticated and late as well
um
that's an old Loco into which the new
electronics has been thrown but once
you've got the electronics in the Loco
you then need some control
facility and this one down here lets you
you know if you press button
two it will blow the horn for instance
and you can tell it to stop and go
forwards and reverse and whatever
now digital command control is the
world's most popular
protocol at the moment but there are
lots of other digital protocols for
sending those packets over the rails
many of them are European based this
Hornby in the UK has their own there's a
bunch in Germany
but digital combine control DCC as it's
known is probably the most popular
globally
so this is a fairly complex diagram I'll
just talked to a little bit of it but as
you can see there's a bunch of
locomotives up there number 9902 and
9907
you've got a command station here
that runs the protocol to the rails and
then you can have as many of these
throttles as they're called to let you
control one or more of the locomotives
this is a wired throttle this is a
wireless one
and the net effect is at any point you
could say well locomotive 9907 turn your
headlight on or move to the left
and none of the other locomotives will
do anything except that one because the
packets have arrived in local locomotive
9907 and it moves
so the the standard DCC was
put forward by the U.S national model
Railway Association it's actually the
result of work by a German company
called lens which gave the protocol to
the NRA and made it open
so commercial DCC products come in a
wide variety and and as I said the the
lens company was actually a commercial
entity their view was to try and make
more Railways more realistic more
interesting and so individual control of
the trains on the layout seemed to be
something that would add value what it's
also added is a whole lot of margin for
the manufacturers
um so you can see the example I give
here is a locomotive that just runs on
regular DC
might sell for 275 that same logo with
digital command control and sound
capability is nearly double the price
in order to run those nice locomotives
you need a controller like this this
these are the commercial offerings a
couple of commercial offerings anyway
the one the left is extremely simple
you can see it's only got a few buttons
it's got one knob
simple plug pack
that sells for 230 dollars
so there's a lot of margin in digital
control
and the manufacturers have been
quite good at creating little lock-in
features as well
so these guys for instance that runs the
standard DCC protocol to the track
but you can buy another throttle
um to plug into that and it will send
commands as well
but the connection between this and its
sibling throttle is a proprietary
standard
so yes even in the world of model
railways there's vendor locking
oh joy
all right so the DCC ex project is one
that I discovered online last year and
and
joined the team
and the the project
has several goals one of which is to
make DCC far more affordable and
accessible for everybody
um because the electronics in those
commercial
controllers
you know if you went to China and got
the one on the left Made For You in even
small quantities would be
ten dollars I mean injection molding is
expensive but the electronics inside can
now be made
in even in very small batches because of
automated factories very cheaply
so the idea was to try and come up with
well could we use the Arduino platform
could we use some of the maker Shields
that the plug into the Arduino easily
um
could be even out innovate
the uh the market because
I don't know whether you've noticed but
in your other consumer devices the
software is the thing that bugs you the
most right
you get this nice new consumer device
and someone's written some software for
it
and it's got a bug
and I know about you but as a software
person that knows the living crap out of
me
because you can see that it's just you
know it needs fixing and the the great
problem then is well how do you get the
fix
there's a lot of I the example I like to
really use a lot is the um
the one of the modems most people use
the routers they use consumer grade
routers at home
they're generally abandoned after about
12 months there's no firmware updates
any security bugs in there any any
issues with the Linux kernel that they
happen to use to flash that particular
modem or router are
no longer supported there's no easy way
of
updating them and the the manufacturer
simply doesn't care
of course that's the basis for why
project like open wrt began
and there in fact I think a godsend in
that regard well we're doing the same
essentially for DCC and model railroads
so
in but what what's interesting is that
model Railway clubs are very much about
community and the people gather they
were the men sheds before they were men
sheds really
back when they were mostly men sadly
um
people will gather and enjoy their Hobby
and
create a community around that
so DCC ex
um
the project itself is all developed and
coordinated by GitHub
but the main Community Gathering happens
in Discord chat
for historical reasons really
but it's interesting to watch people
join
the nice thing about Discord chat is
that we can
provide Global support immediately to
all of our users
and this isn't common in open source
projects you know get to talk to the
developers very directly or quite as
directly as happens on the Discord chart
uh chat
so the software began with the ex
command station project that was the the
replacement of the DCC controller
it's all gpl3 but now there are seven
sub-projects as part of the ecosystem
the interoperate and need to work with
that and each of those projects has a
project lead that thought what if I
could do this in software and it could
talk to that
so in the in this case for instance A
friend of mine has done a project that
lets you run a model Railway turntable
turn the locomotives around them but it
talks to DCC ex and they they
interoperate nicely so it spawned a
bunch of sub-projects and all those
people are part of the same community
and talking to each other
so we're getting this kind of
the number of features being added it
seems to be accelerating as people get
excited about what's possible and and
scratch their own Technical Edge to add
to the ecosystem in some way
so we've got 15 to 20 volunteer
developers with various hardware and
software backgrounds
some of them are even over 70 years old
and they're all writing software
one of them is 70 year old years old and
just retired this year and uh and he's
the lead developer
so
age is no barrier and it never has been
a model railroad model railroading has
often been something that retirees have
done anyway but it's really interesting
to see how many people have joining our
community and they're going well I'm 70
and I've heard about this and I've never
programmed an Arduino in fact I've never
programmed in anything
but how do I do this oh look you mean I
can change this so it's it's really
interesting the generational connection
is is lovely actually
and we're based all across the Royal U.S
UK Sweden France Austria India and
Australia
um
and
it's interesting I I said to the lead
Project Lead Fred one day you know when
I turned up in this group I was talking
to people about well railroading they're
extremely passionate about model
railroading but they're also extremely
passionate about software and open
source
um and and in fact we're starting to do
open Hardware Designs as well
and I said if it felt like I'd met my
people found my people because I'd had
these passions for
longer than I could remember and finally
there were a bunch of people globally
that had the same it was really very
nice
okay
the same time all right
slight slight glitch you get those
all right
um
so
in order to make
the project really accessible we started
using the Arduino platform
and it for those who don't know it's
just an 8-bit microcontroller with a
bunch of peripherals
we've written all this code in C plus
plus
or the pseudo C plus or close to C plus
plus the Arduino provides most of our
developers actually use vs code and
platform i o because it's a much more
sophisticated development environment
but we've tried to make sure that the
code will always compile properly in the
Arduino IDE because we understand that
that's a necessary part of making our
code accessible
to more naive users who perhaps couldn't
cope with
a full vs code and platform i o
installation but nonetheless want to
contribute
so we're very careful about that there's
some 25 000 lines of code in
just the command station Pro the other
ecosystem projects have have even more
lines of code
initially this was all running on an
Arduino Uno which is perhaps the
smallest of the AVR
that's useful in a maker environment it
only has two kilobytes of ram though so
we very quickly
very quickly ran foul of the 2K limit
and
standardized on the mega which has 8K of
RAM
now you may think that's a very small
amount of memory
but
um
it oddly gives you a great deal of
discipline as a software developer
you think very carefully about how
you're implementing things if you want
it to fit in just well the runtime
variables and what have you to fit the
buffers and everything else to fit in 8k
RAM and it turns out the lead developer
who's 70. grew up on systems with that
much RAM
oddly enough so it became something of a
passion of his to actually see just how
much functionality can we squeeze into a
microcontroller that only runs at 16
megahertz and only has 8K of RAM
and it's quite extraordinary what should
you do now the really nice thing about
this is that when you build out the
hardware
which generally requires three pieces of
which most of our users have three
pieces of Hardware the Arduino itself
the motor Shield to actually drive the
signal out to the trains and then a
Wi-Fi board
that comes to less than eighty dollars
Australian
if you buy the parts cheaply from
AliExpress in China and prepared to wait
it can be half that
and it's more functional than
most of the DCC systems that cost
anything less than a thousand dollars
so this is this is the general setup
you'll see there's a mega in the middle
there
there's a power supply for powering
everything some cabling to the track
and then
um most people end up using one of the
Wi-Fi throttles
so the protocol it talks to all Wi-Fi
devices and open protocol called why why
throttle
and
there are apps on both Android and iOS
to let you drive your trains so you can
choose whichever platform you've got so
your average cell phone can immediately
connect
with an app and the apps
most of the apps are free there's one or
two paid apps on there
Apple platform the really really
functional app on the Android platform
is completely open source as well
as being free
um so you can run four throttles off a
single 8-bit microcontroller
and we've added all sorts of facilities
but the the real that the really good
one here is xrail it's a scripting
language to let you do animation
automation
so it will let you detect a train
approaching a Crossing light up the
crossing lights for you
and that's all state machine driven and
still fits in 8k
all right so
we've had a bunch of development
challenges as you can imagine
relying on open source sounds fantastic
but doesn't doesn't come without its
issues
um fortunately the Arduino platform was
used by so many millions of people
since 2005 that it's actually very
mature most of the library is a very
robust and debugged and the
um and the documentation is quite quite
good
um
the third party open source libraries
that come with Arduino vary in quality a
lot and because this is an embedded
system
there's this thing about embedded
systems people get very grumpy when they
stop
especially when they crash for no reason
they can understand and because many of
our users are naive with respect to
technology and what have you want this
to be the level of reliability needed
for DCC
controllers is is perhaps well above
what you know it's running a train you
don't want to do the Gomez Adams thing
and have them actually Collide it would
be good if this thing kept accepting
commands so we've had to in general
re-implement libraries from scratch or
um and we try very hard where we do that
to pick libraries with compatible
licensing
make sure that you know we're
contributing back to the community in as
much as we can and and so on but a lot
of Open Source software developers
especially in the abandoned space seem
to pick various different licensing
models and some of them we just can't
readily accept their code
um
so the you know the standard problems
are that the other thing is that many
many open source projects live for a
while
while the person has the enthusiasm and
then they they move on and and get
abandoned they get picked up and forked
and then you don't know really how well
they've been Falcons on
so we um
we focus really hard on not creating
abandoned wear ourselves
we want this project to go on Beyond us
and we want to documented well enough
that it can be picked up readily and and
kept going so the team's quite diverse
lots of skills and we apply them
to making sure that
this thing doesn't end up
lost
now
without cave Ram you do eventually get
to a point
no matter how clever you are as a 1970s
based Mainframe programmer
um
you eventually need to grow and we have
the interesting thing is that all of the
features that we put in recently is
still fit within that 8K realm barely
but what we're finding is the users as
they discover the platform are getting
more and more excited about what I can
do
and and so we've had users turn up and
say well my layout is
eight meters square and it has 100
switches and 500 signals and can you do
that
and the answer is well
not make K really
we can go a long way but we can't go
that far so
we've got to the point where we need to
make a transition to one of the 32-bit
platforms what's happened in the
embedded world is that those 32-bit
processes have become insanely cheap
you can get uh an arm cortex m0 running
at 48 megahertz for 50 cents
and it'll be three millimeters Square
so the time has come for us to look at
transitioning to to 32-bit arm is a very
obvious Target but also esp32 which is
one that Hugh mentioned this morning as
well
it's very attractive because it's got
the Wi-Fi built in so it actually reduce
the number of components you need to buy
and the modules
just the individual esp32 module even
for a consumer buying one of them
are four dollars
that comes with dual 240 megahertz
processors
and a Wi-Fi stack
yeah now the problem with we have found
with with espressive is that
uh Wally Hardware's quite amazing their
software isn't quite so amazing
and particularly they're open source uh
support isn't as terrific
so when look at looking at the 32-bit
platforms we have 25 000 lines of code
now and we have a legacy problem because
it runs on the Arduino core
so in looking at the 32-bit platforms
we've been looking at can we stick with
one that already has Arduino support
so that because we're a volunteer team
we we had lives some of them are retired
but they seem to be doing a lot of
traveling
and the rest of us have families and and
jobs and so on so we don't have the
engineering resources to really complete
the retool to a different platform very
quickly anyway
and the problem we've found is that the
Arduino core support for the different
processes varies a bit
especially as all of these are
essentially
third-party provided
um because Arduino has grown and decided
to go off into iot land
and doesn't really have maker intentions
quite like it used to
so Arduino has actually decided that
they will shift all of their all of
their platforms all their 32-bit
platforms over to embed OS
and for us that's too big a leap to take
and we found that the 32-bit support and
the Arduino course has really been quite
difficult
now we try and when we find bugs in
anything we try to engage with the
Upstream providers we issue bug reports
we provide code where we find a solution
what have you but what we find is very
often they go completely
ignored it's the best way to put it
so out of all of the platforms we've
looked at so far
the stm32f4 range from St
microelectronics seems to be the most
promising
um
and and that's the one we're working on
at the moment
in fact
the porting to new architectures that
both the samd and the STM
32 Ranger is my responsibility with the
team
um one of the other team members has
done the ESP port to the esp32
and what we discovered was that
despite there being two processors the
Wi-Fi Stacks quite a lot of work
and it wouldn't respond to interrupts
very um reliably
which for Mission critical
in better work we have to produce a
waveform with 58 microsecond transitions
very reliably it would be good if
interrupts were actually taken when they
should
so what's the future
um
it's
it's been interesting to watch the last
six months seems to be in a bit of a
watershed we've had more and more
developers joining the team
um people turning up with some serious
skills and some technical itches that
they want to scratch and then working
extremely well with the team to uh to
build out new functionality
um we've even got uh YouTube bloggers
now actually putting up YouTube articles
about
the uh the product
um
we've got an ecosystem of Hardware being
developed as well
um so release 5.0 is due out soon and
contains a raft of of new and funny uh
features
so there you go there's model
railroading and how model railroading
and open source Collide thank you
thank you
fabulous this is on thank you so much
for that presentation
we have about 10 minutes for questions
and we have one to start us off
fantastic
um
really a question but did you have a
look at the RP 2040 as a micro to use
we have we've done a bunch of
prototyping work to see if the Pio
functionality can produce the waveform
for us the last thing I was um which it
can
um
the there are a couple of drivers that I
didn't mention
the
currently the motor board that we use
is in the Arduino form factor and so
we've tried to look at platforms that
come in that same Arduino Uno R3
socket layout because we want to provide
our existing user base a really easy
transition to the new
to any new standard we come up with so
and we and we want people to be able to
buy the existing Mega option if their
current needs don't require 32-bit
processor and so on
the other thing we discovered when we
looked at the stm32 product is
they have a nucleo range of of boards
that are
better made and cheaper
than the Arduino 8-bit boards yes
despite being 32 bits
so the RP 2040 is really attractive from
point of view of of its price but it
doesn't have a lot of gpio it has this
Pio which is Handy
but it doesn't come in a form factor we
can go right well we can plug that in
right away
so
it's there as a future opportunity
obviously it uses arm cortex underneath
as well so all the work we've done to
make our 8-bit code 32-bit clean
and aligned on the right band reason why
it means that you can do that easily and
there are one or two people exploring it
but it hasn't become our priority
because we've got this other option in
the STM range that's really drop in
do it now
so
did I ask you a question
I was just wondering if there's any sort
of similar efforts on the locomotive
side of things to provide open source
and open Hardware options for those
that there have been the the difficulty
with locomotives is
um
even in the reasonably generous Oneness
to 87 scale there's not a whole lot of
room
in the locomotive so any design has to
be fairly miniaturized it has been made
with all of the smallest snd sized
components now you can do contract
manufacturers in China now will let you
do small batches of things with those
tiny components in them but it's uh it's
a it's quite a level up in engineering
from just doing an Arduino style Board
of our own for instance so we're in the
hardware we're looking at at creating
our goal my goal
suggested to the team was we come up
with open designs that use Kai CAD
circuits produce print and circuit
boards produce the Gerber files and then
anyone can now upload those to a
manufacturer like jlc PCB and go I'd
like 10 of those make them now
with all the components on
so were we to go for the DCC decoder end
of things we try we'd like to try and do
the same thing
so that even you know the the most most
clubs have an Electronics Gig if that
person in a club can go right well I I
know how to upload the files I know how
to get jlc PCB to make us a hundred for
the club should we do a batch order
that's that's my goal for a for Open
Source Hardware for DCC and we don't
quite have the expertise for boards
small enough to be decoders not made any
easier by the fact that
modern locomotive manufacturers have
come up with their
drop-in ones and they all have different
shapes
so there's vendor locking everywhere you
look
but we will we do have code
aimed at doing that we just don't have a
hardware designers yet
um okay that's the locomotive size what
about fur points and signals and lights
on the track that's all cater for
already
so this is CeX we'll talk to existing
maker boards that will drive all that
sort of stuff so you can plug into the I
squared C bus a Servo controller and
then all your points can be surveyed or
you can have semaphores that are servoed
or you can have you know people emerging
from buildings via servos all that sort
of stuff
um what we're going to do though is
we're going to come up with a bunch of
open Hardware Designs that take because
the maker boards at the moment are
designed for people to just sort of plug
in with Dupont connectors and and wire
up ad hoc what we'd like to have is a
nice sort of ecosystem where people can
just plug those things together and they
work
so we're going to do Hardware designs
for all of that
hi
uh just wondering if you can elaborate a
bit more on the physical layer because
the rails are carrying both the power
and the signaling I just want to
understand more about that also what are
Power districts
sorry yes I probably didn't explain that
well
um
basically it's a square wave on the
rails where each rail alternates
polarity
and it's at a frequency of around
what's it end up being six kilohertz or
something six and a bit kilohertz
it was it was designed a long time ago
it was designed by Lance in 1980. using
1980 technology and understanding of
switching and all that sort of stuff so
it probably could be improved now with
in different frequency choice and all
sorts of things people are also looking
at transporting the protocol wirelessly
so you just put us a voltage on the
rails and then the protocol goes
wirelessly because now Wireless has
gotten smaller we can actually put
inside of Loco
which wasn't the case in 1980 there's
another scheme called Dead rail where
you actually take the the power off the
rails entirely
and you put rechargeable batteries in a
locomotive and you put the electronics
in there and then control that
wirelessly with no voltage on any of the
Rails
because one of the traditional weak
points of model railroading has been how
well can you pick up and how reliably
can you pick up the voltage off the
rails
modern DCC locomotives often have what
they call a keep alive in them with this
capacitor in it so if they go over a
dead portion of the track they can keep
driving the motor until they reach a
portion of the track that's got better
contact
question power districts um
turns out when you put Electronics in in
locomotives people want to put more and
more Electronics in and and the
locomotives are with sound in them can
consume quite a lot of power
our base design only puts out about 1.5
amps per per section of track that
you've created a district in
um
sorry it only puts out 1.5 amps so what
you end up doing is creating is sort of
splitting the track into some power
districts and putting giving each of
them a power supply basically that runs
off the same signal but it just
amplifies
for a different portion of the track
the issue you have I mean you can try
putting 20 amps into your rails
well anything goes wrong it tends to
melt things
so what we try what we suggest is people
only ever think about putting it in most
five amps into the rails and that means
at some point on a really big layout
you've just got to chop it in half and
go
we run one amplifier in there one
amplifier in there but we run the same
DCC signal out to everything so when
they transition from one to the other
it's seamless
one in the front row
not so much a question but just the
observation the MIT Tech Model Railroad
Club was a very big part of early hacker
culture to the 1960s even earlier I
think yeah
but due to the lack of Internet no one
knew about it um
no it was a very active group and it was
really interesting if you read the
history of that group at MIT the kinds
of people attracted to that group are
precisely the people in in our community
the same kind of ethos yeah it's the
history of it's certainly worth reading
for that reason
just a final question for me
um has all of these Innovations sort of
lit a fire under the the providers of
those proprietary services that you grew
up with and have they come up with
anything amazing as a result uh no well
no what they've done is some of them
have upped their attempts to further
vendor locking
but but one vendor in the US TCS
actually came out with a throttle
that speaks the open y throttle protocol
and will control our Hardware
so there's a little wind there a little
wind they've got two throttles you can
buy commercial throttles you can buy
that talk
that protocol
is also a legacy in our view because
there's lots of things that were
designed into that in 2014 that you
wouldn't do now
so we have our own protocol but that's
open and we're talking about
getting support for that too
well I hope many more changes there
because if you can't beat them I'm
trying
to join us yes thank you so much
everyone for being here um of course
that session off one final round of
applause for Paul thank you so much
[Applause]