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Receintly, in an unfortunate turn of events, most of the equipment for this project was stolen.
If you could help replace the stolen train engines, gondolas, & switch track, you can!
Your contribution of $5.00 can help us get this project finished, thank you.
This is a newtwork that uses trains & gondolas to send information from one computer to another. Its easy to see how it works when you think of each train as a packet. The gondolas hold the information marbles like a buffer. A signle marble represents a digital one, & no marble present is a digital zero. A loading and unloading station is used at each computer to load and unload (read and write) to each train (packet).
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#1 This pictue shows the Gondola in a dump position, you can also see a marble as it rolls down the shoot. |
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#2 This shot shows how the soliniods for the marble loading are positioned. The soliniods are connected to gates that are made from wire. |
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#3 The gates allow a single marble to drop at a time. As the soliniod lifts up the gate, one pole moves up to block the #2 marble while another pole moves up to release the #1 marble. |
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#4 In this photo we can see the latch for dumping the gondola. At the time of this picture the lever is still being worked on. |
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#5 Gondola 2.0, This gondola is made from copper sheeting. The sheet is coated. I found this materal for a real good price so thats what most of the gondolas are made from. |
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#6 Here we see the Dump section of the loading/unloading station. That finger is then positioned over the switch. That switch will act as a trigger as marbles dumps out of the gondola. |
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#7 Now the finger is pressing down on the switch, activating it. Note that there is a whole in the train track to allow for the marbles to pass through. |
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#8 This is STEP 1 of the gate's loading process, we are using blue marbles because they are easier to see. |
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#9 This is STEP 2 of the gate's loading process. Here you can see that the gate has lifted and the first marble has fallen into the gondola. The next marble has not fallen because of a pole that has moved up from underneath preventing it from falling. |
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#10 This is STEP 3 of the gate's loading process. Now the gate has moved down, & the second marble has moved forward into the #1 spot. This makes it so that every time the gate moves up and down, a single marble will drop into the gondola. |
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#11 This is one of the 1st versions of the gondola. Do you notice all the scrap brass? |
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#12 This is a picture of the communication track section. The tracks are not nailed down, this is just to check for clearance. The wooden pegs will be used to join the sections together. |
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#13 This circuit board (one of two) is used to control relays that in turn control the loading station. This board connects to the PC's parrallel port.Its not a true Bi-directional parrallel port. It uses a buffer for the inputs. For instance, the "printer is out of paper" status bit is wired to the "train ready to unload" signal. A speacial thanks goes out to Tomi Engdahl's Parallel port output page, Craig Peacock's Beyond Logic page. |
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#14 This is the buffer station, it still has some work. what it does is provide a station for holding empty trians. Using ladder logic the trains are parked on the differnt sections of track. When the PC needs an emty trian, the ladder logic decides which train to activate. The ladder logic works just like a Stack (push in, pop out) |
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#15 Now this is the kind of train engine that I wanted to use for my network. The GE ES44AC Demonstrator #2005 (DC). You can read more about it at Tower 55's GE ES44AC. Or you can go to GE sight and read about the auctual engine, GE Evolution Series Locomotives www.GE.com. Since the engines I want are very exspensive and more for show than use, I decided to re paint some cheeper train engines to make them look like GE Evalations. Here they are with a base coat, Life-Like Engine with base coat.
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