@Jeff: I've got an unpolished video of the maiden run of my first completed board installed in a pair of Chessie F3's. Electronics are in the lead engine and battery is in trailing engine. (Control module *and* two 2200 mAh batteries fit in my SF Dash9 easily). Sorry about the CNW cars behind them They were most convenient ones to grab as a test load. As you can see in the video, my dream layout is very much under construction. It's two levels with a hidden automated elevator between levels for transferring from mainline to yards below. Varying scenery will be projected using $100 LED projectors, and audio will be multichannel with effects determined by observer position in room. Tracking of trains will be done using cameras. A past tracking project: https://github.com/pfr/VideoSpeedTracker . This mix of trains and electronics is what I think has the best hope of keeping our hobby healthy.
I plan to post better videos discussing my approach and some overview of the hardware construction, as video of operations. I also plan to post my software on Github so others can have access to it.
Here's a shot of the Web based interface I built. It was quick and dirty but works fine for my testing: What you see is the top level page on the left. When you click on an engine it opens a new tab, which you can then drag out onto the desktop so that you have concurrent views of everything. I've done that twice here.
