I purchased a Raspberry PI B and a pololu motor control board to run 2 DC can motors. Without too much effort I was able to make the motors go in a reasonable enough fashion to probably send the boards and motors with appropriate wheel trucks and mounting plate around the track.
I haven't done that part yet due to not understanding how to power it independent of a very long cord.
I should note that my "motor control" is incredibly primitive, there's no feedback to the software that tells it anything about the state of the motors. And the raspberry pi isn't really (it's a small linux box) really quite the right thing here. But I picked it because it was cheap, easy and I thought "on the abstract" end of things which works for me.
https://www.raspberrypi.org/pr...pberry-pi-3-model-b/
In other words, I just wanted to get going.
Here's the pololu board: https://www.pololu.com/product/2756
Again there are lots of other choices out there in this area -- including a full on motor controller that provides feedback. I didn't pick that (yet) but could as I was hoping to roll my own feedback at some pt.
I also have this board but I've not used it yet, it has more power at the finger tips:
https://www.pololu.com/product/3750
And finally the motor driver can run the PI with addition of one of these boards, and I have one of them but I forgot exactly which one. This remains unsoldered.
https://www.pololu.com/product/2831
And the motors: they are mabuchi RS-2xx, such as these (below).
I've 3 set of motors -- 2 are used and one I pair I bought from this forum new and were from MTH.
These are cheap widely available motors but I wanted the worm & flywheel already mounted and that to me at least is not widely available for the specific application.
https://product.mabuchi-motor.com/detail.html?id=95
The main problem again is how to drive all this on the layout without a long wire. On the bench I'm using a fixed power supply which I believe puts out 6 amps and 24 volts DC. That goes right into the board. That in the end could be 3 amps per motor -- and that's not quite enough but it's a start and appears to work reasonably well as it stands now.
The suggestion on another thread was to take an appropriate rectifier for the AC inputs, add some large caps to that output and send that into the motor control board DC inputs.
I like that solution because I do roughly understand it. Another option as is shown in one of pics is to use a battery. (I understand that too but which battery?)
In the ideal of course maybe both or something is needed to keep the PI linux from power cycle problems as the track goes in and out -- as linux is not really made for that.
So I do see that issue, but that's something else to solve after just getting it going around in a circle on the layout -- less a long power cord.
