How long is yours or have you got enough?

[UKSGR]

Firstly, sorry but I could not resist the title.. In the latest issue of Garden Railways, there as an article about how long is your railway and how to build an Odometer to measure it. Well, being into both the railway and electronics, I decided to build 1. And what a surprise. There is more track than I thought (Don't tell SWIMBO)
Here it is at the start of the main loop

Distance set to zero

Pass the rosemary. About half way.

Back approximately to where it started.

The wife thinks there's about 100 feet.

OOPS

This is the bit that measures by counting the revolutions. Before using, it has to be calibrated. It is all explained in the magazine by the maker, Bob Applegate.

Paul

 

[Gizzy]

I just count each LGB 10000 or 11000 track section!

Very clever though Paul....

 

[tramcar trev]

Very Clever.... I wont need one though as I know exactly how much rail I bought, divided by 2 and subtract what is remaining in my garage and presto I have only 20 metres or so....

 

[KeithT]

Natty little gadget, it would be interesting to see how far a train travels in a day's running.
My son often does highway surveys and so I borrowed his odometer, the 'unicycle' type, they are surprisingly accurate, and wheeled it around the track. 40.9m x2 (double track) not including sidings.

 

[CoggesRailway]

I keep wondering how long mine is. very clever electronicticity....

 

[New Haven Neil 2]

There's an easier way....

http://www.gardenrailwayclub.com/workshop/a-simple-speedometer

 

[stockers]

I got one like that off ebay Neil. I was after the wagon and the bike bit was effectively free. Mine was not calibrated correctly because of the small size of the wagon wheel. However by multiplying that by 22.5 it came into the range available in the electronics and that of course gives scale speed and distance rather than actual. Divide results by 22.5 and your back to actual figures.

 

[New Haven Neil 2]

They work well in general Alan, I didn't have any difficulty calibrating mine either way, but found it more interesting personally to use 'real' miles. I suppose some versions may not be able to cope with the small wheels, I distantly recall something about doing ten revolutions or something? Regardless, it's an interesting little toy - that wagon covered 60 odd miles last year! I still haven't put one in a coach so that passenger miles get counted too, I really should as it seems to coaches get more running than they used to.

 

[UKSGR]

This is easily calibrated and I have just finished editing the software so that it measures in metres and kilometres. Because it measures the actual distance, you can then change the scale and see how far the wagon has travelled in any of the supported scales or actual distance. Here is a metric readout.

Next thing is to see how much track I have laid in total (without her seeing)

 

[nygma]

I saw the same article on Garden Railways. I was thinking about building an odometer for myself as well. I found a development board which has a screen few buttons all wired up already. It has an accelerometer and an SD card slot as well. I was thinking that it would be useful to log data to the SD card for later analysis. I would like it to show scale/actual speed, distance as well. I was also thinking about adding another sensor (reed switch/magnet) to detect when the train passes the start of the loop to also record how steam engine is performing loop after loop.

Do you think any of these would be useful?