# DCC deadrail with the Protothrottle



## Martan (Feb 4, 2012)

I'm not sure how many folks here are interested in DCC 'dead rail' using battery power but I've been sharing some of my experiments over on LSC and a Faceboox group gscale.net so I thought I would post here for those who don't frequent those.

I am working on controlling DCC diesels and live steam using the 'Protothrottle'. I've got other incarnations working for Bluetooth and Airwire but have been concentrating on the Protothrottle for a while now, mostly because its way cool and has an Xbee in it for communication, which offers a real wireless network.

If you are interested, I have more info and some video on my blog:

http://martinsant.net/?p=3938
http://martinsant.net/?p=3979


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## Treeman (Jan 6, 2008)

What are the advantages over the Air Wire Converter, and the T5000 throttle.


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## Martan (Feb 4, 2012)

Well, for me, two things - the first is the Protothrottle is very 'realistic'. It has a a very tactile feel with real levers etc. I confess I was quite skeptical about it, it's a bit pricey but once I used it for a while I see why people like it so much.

The second thing is that it uses Xbee which is a very popular Industrial Control (IoT) wireless network. For me, as an experimental sort, this lets me use 'off the shelf' open source things like the Raspberry Pi, Arduino, etc to manipulate it.

But I like the T5000 too, so I also am working on a 'translator' that will all allow the Protothrottle to 'speak' Airwire. I also have a couple of inexpensive Airwire DCC receiver designs I'm working on.


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## Treeman (Jan 6, 2008)

Very interesting. The question about AW, is customers asking about automation, even simple back and forth. I have no solution for them. Guessing the technology is here some where.


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## Martan (Feb 4, 2012)

Yes, that is the primary appeal of Xbee. Airwire is simply DCC over the air with the throttle as the 'master', so, master->slave is all you really get. It's very simple to intercept and requires a very minimal set of hardware to get the DCC signal to the decoder but it's not very flexible for anything else.

With Xbee, it's peer to peer, any 'node' can talk to any other node. You can 'direct' a message to a device and it can respond (or not), or you can 'broadcast' to all nodes- it really opens up the idea of automating anything be it DCC decoders or servos or what-have you. The disadvantage is that a DCC node has to generate it's own DCC stream whereas Airwire you just pull it right off the air. But that just takes a bit of software so it's not a big deal.

I've been messing with Xbee for a long time now and built several custom controllers for it, but the Protothrottle is the first real 'production' device (that I know of) that runs Xbee Series 1, so being the nerd that I am I was very excited to start playing with it


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