Well, it has been a bit since I posted, and I wanted to update on our progress to date. I had to wait for the IR receivers (tsop382) to arrive. In the meantime, we captured the various commands sent to the train from the legacy base unit to get an idea of what we were up against. The ir receivers arrived and I wired one up for testing to an arduino mega 2560, programmed it to flash an led signal when it received ir signal from a remote, then today we tested it on the tender behind the engine. The results are positive, it will receive a signal as the tender passes over. I wasn't quite sure if the ir signal from the tender was of the spectrum required, but the test removed all doubt. So we now have all the hardware required, and simply(or not so simply) need to write the software and upload it to the arduino to test. As I stated in previous post, the ir signal is simply a trigger to start a series of commands which will run in a loop, continuous all day until powered down, and will restart in the morning when powered up. Since we won't know the location of the train when power is turned on, it will slowly begin as a normal power up until it passes over the ir receiver at which point it will do certain commands, and repeat those commands for 3 more passes at which point it will slow to a stop, make certain noises intermittently for a period of 20 or 30 minutes, then start the loop over again. This pattern will continue throughout the day until powered down.
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