Welcome to Stefan Keller-Tuberg's home page
Welcome to my pages of model train,
My family and me standing in front of the Greenbank "monster" Telescope in West Virginia and in the garden. The engine waiting at the station is of the Durbin and Greenbrier Valley Railroad situated nearby the Greenbank Telescope.
Click on the images for a larger view (approx 50k bytes each).
One of my "spare time" activities has been the design and construction of a computer controlled model train set. There are many ways I could have chosen to build it and the articles here tell all about it.
Links to other model train sites
I visited a telegraph museum in regional Australian early in 2022 and heard that they were having some issues maintaining the emulated telegraph network they used to communicate in morse with other telegraph museums. I felt I might be able to use Raspberry Pis to help show how to resolve the problems and my expectation was that that emulating a telegraph over the Internet using UDP to convey the timing of morse key-presses must have been done before.
When I returned home and searched, I found many references to what looked to be simple 'school-project' style solutions (eg using a Raspberry Pi to flash a morse signal light), or examples of how to remotely turn something on and off over the Internet, but I couldn't find any projects aimed at accurately conveying a fast train of precisely timed 'on' 'off' transitions using UDP that would maintain each transition's precise timing and tolerate the usual random packet loss, delay and jitter. So I coded something up, gave it point to multipoint capabilities, ensured it worked for both IPv4 and IPv6, added a web interface to make it 'easy' to use, included a morse decoder to translate from morse back into text, and recently added a text-to-morse feature that lets you type in plain text, and the programme will translate it into morse and send it as morse code. It was more work than I expected, but I think it now does a half reasonable job!
I have written about it and shared the code here.