Professor Chaos posted:I've prototyped out a replacement for the Mini-Commander ACC or HC, using an Arduino module and an HC-12 radio receiver.
It doesn't receive TMCC signals directly; a single HC-12 connected to the command base broadcasts the TMCC commands to all the others. So it's not a drop-in replacement for the MC. But it ran about $12 in parts; less if I hadn't used a commercial power supply module.
Of course, in addition to driving triacs like the MC, it could be programmed to drive servos or any other circuitry you wanted. And you could program it for as complex behavior as you like... just need to think of some applications!
This has possibilities, I'm not wedded to the R2LC approach, it just seemed to be a simple means to an end.
I think one key item is to try to keep it compact. I know you can buy the Arduino processors as a separate part, so perhaps building a board around the chip would keep it to a reasonable size. For most of our applications, you wouldn't need all the extra stuff that comes on these boards. Of course, making a sandwich with something like an Arduino Nano might be an option as well.
The one downside of this approach is it requires a lot of up-front work to get started, we would have to decode the serial data and sort out all the timing issues of the TMCC protocol. I've done a bit of that, but there's a lot more to do for this to be useful.
