Gazz292

For the past few weeks my 3D printer has been going almost non stop. If anyone's interested, it's a Prusa i3 MK3s, all stock except for a revo 6 quick change nozzle hotend and a raspberry Pi 3 running OctoPrint, The revo 6 nozzle allows me to change nozzle sizes in seconds without tools (or risks of leaks) and i regularly swap between the 0.25mm one for detail to the 0.8mm one when i want a quick 'prototype' of a basic shape, tho the 0.4mm one lives in it most of the time. ... OctoPrint allows me to send the printer it's G-code files to print remotely, so i only have to go to the printer when it's finished printing (as long as the correct colour filament is already loaded) This is very handy as it's a long walk from my bedroom to where the printer lives at the other end of the house. I built the printer from the kit version about 4 years ago, it just... works, i can count on my hands the number of failed prints i've had over the 4 years, and they were all my fault... forgetting a brim on tall thin objects. Anyway, back to the controllers, It's no secret that i love the EU07 loco, but i am also falling for the EN57, so i decided to make some 'mini' controllers to drive that cute little EMU at my laptop desk, then carry on with the EU07 style power wheel... tho when i have a simulator room i may concentrate on making full sized controls. If anyone knows the exact size of something in the EN57's cab, say the diameter of the brake handle's ball, let me know as i'd like to work out what 'scale' my EN57 controllers are, i sized them to fit comfortably in my large hands, i call them mini controllers but compared to a raildriver, they are quite large. And here are my controllers sat next to a raildriver for a size comparison. Below is a photo of my laptops overbed table today (12/12/23) it is a different table to the one in my first post, this one is a proper hospital overbed table that i fitted an extended top to, giving a total of 1 meter width by 400mm deep, plus i added a 'mouse/tracker ball' platform around the main 'leg' of the table (i had to change my bed from a divan to a wooden post style so the hospital table would fit... <i spend a lot of time 'stuck in bed' due to medical issues i have, hence why i have my laptop and controllers on an overbed table>) The EU07 button box is just sitting on the table top for now, i will re-print that sometime to take advantage of the extra width i have now, the EU07 style horn lever is the item in the lower right with the red ball, and the 'Radmor' style microphone is still the same one from before, still mounted to it's holder attached to the back of the small tablet mount. I got a 6 button 1 knob 'macropad' off amazon to use as a temporary radio controller, seen wedged between the left hand side of the laptop and the EU07 button box above: I had to set up a button for 'radio on' and 'radio off' as you can't bind the same key for radio on and off, when i make a 3D printed Radmor radio, it will have the proper latching power button that will be able to send the on and off keys when pressed, and i will use a 10 position rotary switch with different resistors for each position, then an arduino will read the analogue signal and send the correct channel number for the position it's in. This can be done thanks to the individual channel numbers we can now set keybinds to in SimRail, ATM my rotary encoder has no way of knowing which channel it's on, so i rotate it all the way left until the channel switch in the sim stops rotating, then count clicks to the right to change channel when needed (i.e. count 5 clicks to be on channel 5 etc) You probably noticed in the photo of my laptop desk that the controllers are mounted on the front of the desk, they slide into 3D printed dovetail mounts so i can quickly add or remove them, change their positions (i do that with the brake lever usually) And as i make more controllers for different trains, i will swap out the correct controllers before i take over a train in SimRail: My power lever and reverser: All the lever controllers have quite a few separate parts that fit together, i don't have a multi colour setup for 3D printing, so things like the reverser's top plate and the power levers plate are simple manual colour changes (printed with the 0.25mm nozzle for detail) The power handle was printed standing upright, with a colour change where the (M12) threaded part starts, and all threads are 3D printed, down to M3 x 0.5 threads for the screws to hold everything together. Below is a screenshot of Fusion 360 (hobbyists free edition) showing the insides of the power and reverser lever box: The levers rotate on 2 x (15 x 21 x 4) bearings housed in the 9mm thick top panel, the yellow disc is the 'notch wheel' which allows the levers 'click' between the notches (7 for power, 5 for reverser) The red long 'twangers' have a screw anchoring them at the far end, but loose enough so they are free to rotate, and a spring goes from the front threaded hole in the 'twangers' to one of the 3 sets of threaded holes to the left of the twangers (so i can vary the notch force) You'll likely notice the reverser's twanger is all plastic (i grease the notch plate and twangers pivot) that's fine as that lever does not get moved that much, but the power lever twanger has bearings where it rides against the notch plate, those bearings are 4mm OD, 1.5mm ID and 1.5mm tall.. a pair is stacked in the power levers twanger. Finally the rotation of the lever moves the 43 tooth (module 1) gear, which rotates the 19 tooth gear, and that rotates the shaft of a 5K potentiometer. An arduino beetle* then reads the potentiometers positions, and when it detects the lever has been moved enough to have moved from one notch to another, it sends the relevant keyboard key to SimRail to move the lever in the sim up or down a notch, or as many notches as the levers moved, i've found that a 70 millisecond delay between sending keypresses allows the lever in the sim to keep up with fast movements, and at each end of the travel, i.e. in the last notch, the arduino sends 3 keypress events, this ensures any missed movements is taken care of, And if i take over a train and the reverser is in 'forwards 1' but my reverser is in 'forwards 2' when i move my lever back one notch it will move the trains lever to position 0, but i then move my lever back to forwards 2, and thanks to the 3 keypresses it then sends, the trains lever moves all the way to the end notch too. * The Arduino beetle is a mini Arduino Leonardo with only a few inputs... i only needed 2 x analogue inputs for this controller, But you need a Leonardo or pro micro type arduino with an ATmega32U4 processor to send HID keyboard keys * So there isn't a massive wall of text, i'll post about the brake lever and door switch panel in the next post.

The EN57 has 2 toggle switches for the doors so each side can be opened and closed separately, but we only have a keybind for 'close all doors' Would it be possible to add 2 new keybinds for closing just the left or right side doors? as well as keeping the current close all doors key as i believe that's how it works in the more modern trains, So if the current 'close all doors' key is pressed, it does that, closes both sides with a single button, But if the left or right side close button is pressed, then only that side closes... for those odd occasions when you stop in a station with a platform on both sides of the train. : I do have a reason to have separate door close keybinds... apart from making it more realistic... when i use my switch panel to open both sides doors, when i flip one switch to close, in the sim both of them flip down and both red lights go out, yet on my panel one of the switches will still be up and red light on (the lights on my switch panel simply go on and off with the door switches, as we can't read data from SimRail yet)

i imagine that should be one of the stop markers... usually showing 200, or 400 etc so you know where to stop your train of that length.

right now, i've just been driving in the snow on EN1. The weather in SimRail is live, so when it snows in real life in the area you are driving in, it should snow in the sim. The exception is a few servers are set to a different date, like EN2 (i think it's that one) is set to september, so still has summer textures, not sure how they handle the weather in those servers... rain when it snows IRL? use saved weather data... or just make it up. I can imagine the servers set for September are so we can see the autumn season in SimRail without waiting till September 2024.

yes, IRL every single sleeper is different, every patch of ballast a slightly different shade, size of stone etc, every length of track a slightly different rust colour and amount of wear on the surface. But who it going to take on the job of walking the 500+Km's of tracks in SimRail and making individual textures for every meter of track, sleeper and ballast? (also, SimRail is set in 2018, so you'd have to rely on photo's of what the track was like back then... a lot worse condition than today, hence all the low speed limits in SimRail) And then imagine the performance hit for having to load new track textures all the time as you are moving, Sure it'll look amazing for those who stare at the tracks as they drive, but you have to call the line somewhere and use generic repeating textures to save computer resources.

doesn't TrackIr come with the reflective baseball cap attachment anymore? it just needs the 3 reflectors in roughly the right position, and enable the TrackIr cameras infrared leds, and theres no need to be 'tethered' Tho i used the IR led bar thing on a BVG drivers cap to drive Omsi, as i liked to drive in the dark when i was driving at night time, as the reflective thingy didn't fit on the BVG cap very well. You could always plug the IR led bar (thats made to clip onto headphones i think) into a usb power bank that you stick in a pocket, there's no data going to the led's just power. My laptop has a Tobii eye tracking webcam, so i use that, but it needs light to work, so if i turn the room lights all off when i'm driving at night in SimRail, it can't pick up my face / eyes, so i always have to have a side light on. The software i use to convert Tobii to TrackIr... 'FaceTrackNoIr' can apparently work with some standard webcams too.... i can't go back to any driving simulator without head tracking now. Occasionally i'll move my head around as if i was in the real train being bounced about, just to create my own cab sway effect 😄

Doh!, i get my left and rights mixed up, it is indeed left low, right high tone.

If they do that in real life, then i could be added, The communications options we have in SimRail are realistic for the time period (2018) hence no GSM radio... it's all analogue, and the land line phones between dispatch stations.

that is a great video, really shows how much you bounce about in these old trains. i can imagine that maybe one reason for very small 'head bob' movements in the sim is some people use the mouse to drive, it's already hard at times for me to operate the switches that are mouse only atm as i use TrackIr (well, a Tobii eye tracker webcam, with FaceTrackNoIr to convert the signal to TrackIr) and if i move my head whilst aiming the mouse for a switch, i will miss it. So maybe a way to have the mouse pointer move with the cab sway would be needed, or have a keyboard key to hold down to temporarily disable cab sway, operate the control with the mouse then release the key to get the cab sway back. Or just give us the ability to map every control to keybinds... and / or joystick buttons / axis, and there'd be no reason to touch the mouse once you've clicked the on screen button to turn the bot off and take over driving, The mouse would then just be used to move the view around.

i remember reporting things like this in tsw, and being told, it's low down on the bug list as it doesn't break the game, so may not be fixed for a while... a while was 2 years and counting in some cases.

ahhh... they had the horn key binds backwards in a lot of trains... i noticed it as i use a 2 way joystick switch as my horn lever (EU07 based) so left should be high tone, right low tone. The keybinds were fixed with the last hotfix update.... but i guess there was more to it than just switching the key binds, and the animations in some trains need changing too. Any drivers of the other trains that were affected with the reversed horn keybinds noticed if the horn lever / switch / pedals move the wrong direction?

yes, having a slider to set how much sway and bounce you see would be nice, i know some people hate cab motion, i recall they had it in tsw but people were complaining it was making them 'sea sick'... so rather than give players the option of turning it on or off, or varying it's intensity, it was switched off altogether for a while.

before the update, most servers had 1 or 2 players in them, even EN1 could be deserted half the day. So add in private servers taking away people, and the official servers would be even more depopulated, how long till the dev's think 'hardly anyone playing, may as well cancel the project and shut everything down' ? a lot of people who want private servers say they want them so basically 'they can play god' the 'my server, you play it how i like or get out' i know some people just want to mess about, crash trains, go as fast as they can in reverse and do other 'weird' things. But SimRail is supposed to be a consumer version of the professional train driving training simulator, i bought it so i could pretend i am a real train driver and drive as if it was real life, each time i drive i try to learn something and do better than my last run, be it learning the route, braking points, running to schedule etc.

the timetables should all be the same size no matter what train you are in, i 'think' in real life they are printed on A5 paper, or 2 parts of the timetable side by side on A4 in landscape format? but i could have that totally wrong here. i presume the driver would pick up a print out of the relevant timetables (and O orders etc) when they book on duty, i'd imagine they are printed on demand nowadays. Some 1980's German cab ride videos i've watched showed the driver preparing for his duty, where he was handed a typewritten scrap of paper with his duty on it from the booking on clerk, Then he went into a room and picked out the relevant sheets of pre-printed paper to make up his timetable and 'notices' from a load of pidgeon holes under a very long desk.

The past few months i've mostly been enjoying SimRail... plus getting back into my Omsi bus driving cab build ... I began to get the bits together for the force feedback steering system i'm building for my bus driving rig, i'll be using 'EMC-FFB' software, and it's firmware that i loaded onto a STM32F black pill board, a 4000 pulse per rotation optical encoder will sense the wheels position, a 150 watt E-scooter motor will provide the force feedback (add in a couple of big H-bridges and a 24 volt 30 amp power supply, i then just need to make the mechanicals to connect the motor and encoder to the bus steering shaft. But that's in my shed, and winter is here and it's far too cold to be in there... so i'm waiting on having a wall taken down in the house so i can have a nice warm simulator room. So i had a play with the encoder at my laptop, just to prove that part of the system works, it does... i have a full 6 and a half turns lock to lock (or about 2360 degrees) so i will have 1:1 steering in the sim, miles better than using the consumer FFB wheels that max out at 900 or 1024 degrees (half the number of turns a bus has) I also had a play with a different way to get the dashboard data out of Omsi using BusBoardInterface2, and managed to get a few things working that weren't possible using Komsi : Anyway, enough about the bus sim, this is the SimRail forum... Whilst i had the encoder mounted on my laptop desk i decided to try and use it to control the EU07 in SimRail, i tried 'Joystick Gremlin' to read the encoder rotation and send button pulses every few degrees, which JoytoKey made into the up and down keyboard presses to control SimRail. That kind of worked, but with no notches it was very hard to control the train, so i 3D printed a mini EU07 style wheel and a notch wheel, and thinking ahead i made the 'twanger' that the notch wheel flicks as the wheel is rotated hit microswitches, so turning the wheel one way hits the up microswitch, turning it the other way the down microswitch is hit, all the time giving nice heavy notches to push the wheel past to move it. The Fusion360 render below is showing how it works a little better, the yellow 'twanger' has a pair of springs going from the end hole to the holes in the plate, and the microswitches are not shown in the render either, but you can see them in the photo above... this is just one way to get notches, (i have a better more compact method that i'll show in the next post... but it doesn't hit the microswitches, so instead i use a potentiometer to read the position, then an arduino to read the position and send keyboard commands as the controller moved from notch to notch... that is going to take a lot of messing in the code for the 43 notches, but it can be done.) The microswitch method actually worked pretty well so i gave up on using the encoder (i might try again reading it with an arduino some time) But for now i was using a STM32F blue pill board loaded with FreeJoy to read the microswitches, i've mentioned these before as i use them in my button boxes and i highly rate them... Especially as the cost is about £5 for the STM32F board, plus £3 or so for the programmer (one time purchase, you use it again on other boards) And the FreeJoy software is as it's name hints at... free). I did get a bit of contact bounce if i rotated the wheel too fast, but when i tried again with an arduino and using interrupts to read the switches, i was able to spin the wheel far faster than i would normally and the wheel in SimRail moved perfectly in sync with it..... That is until the November 2023 update, i think the new animations on the controls are messing with inputs, as now if i rotate the wheel faster than about 3 to 5 notches a second the wheel in SimRail stops moving 😞 I get this with my macropad's encoders too, so i can only hope that something can be changed to allow faster inputs again, or i'll be stuck waiting for the joystick axis input to be introduced to the sim (which i really thought was happening with this update, but apparently it was a miscommunication and it was gamepad support we got in this update...... ....erm, ok.... ...thanks.... .....i guess. 🤨 I really am not a fan of gamepads for train simulators, leave them for the shooting games where they belong, there are just too many buttons, switches and levers to operate in the good train sim to make a gamepad of any use i think... but others think differently, and some think me messing about making controllers is madness when the keyboard and mouse can do it all, but i do like immersion, and having to drag a lever or push a button with a mouse breaks immersion for me. Right, i've got a 3D print that's finished, so i need to go and get it and start another, next post i'll show one of the mini controllers i am building right now for the EN57.

have you driven a 141xx / 411xx service yet? from Katowice to Warsaw takes about 3 and a half hours if all goes well. some people say that's too long !! Then when you get to the end of the map and get kicked out... (because not all of Poland's rail network is modelled in SimRail ya know, 'only' 500 Km worth of it ... so at the end it really is the end, you can't keep driving as there's no more scenery to drive on (yet) ... you can always take another train back in the opposite direction... just like a real driver would ... so they can go home after finishing their shift (after a rest break of course) i don't think you'll get much more realistic that SimRail, it is based on the simulator used to train real life train drivers (parent company SimKol makes them, what we have is that software slightly modified for consumers) We don't really drive scenarios, that implies scripted runs and events, i.e. the same every time, in multiplayer you will never have the exact same run twice, other humans driving trains and human dispatchers mean things can't be scripted, even the Ai has to be able to make 'decisions' to adapt to what's happening around it. In the paper timetables there should be a ;zd for the entry for Katowice and Warszawa Wschodnia, that means 'crew change' i.e. thats where you'd get off the train and take a break, there are laws regarding how long a train driver can be at the controls for... but we can spend 20 hours driving in SimRail if we wanted, just chose from the many different services in the timetable (hint, chose an empty server to see all the services available, should be 70 or so every hour)

I've posted this in the 'community made content' part of the forum, but i can imagine a lot of people don't know that exists, I made an explanation sheet to help understand what is going on with the drivers timetables we now have in the sim... As usual, pictures with text seem to be shown fuzzy in the forum preview, click the picture and it should open up much clearer... a .pdf version is also included. Let me know if i've got anything wrong and i'll correct it asap. Timetable explanation for SimRail.pdf

Thought this might be of use to people now that we have realistic drivers timetables in the sim. The preview looks fuzzy, click it to see the sheet in full resolution, also included is a .pdf version. Timetable explanation for SimRail.pdf

Is this thing i made of any use... sorry i couldn't make it neater, but there is so much info in the timetables all over the place. Please click the image to see it clearly, it is fuzzy in the preview only, also included is a .pdf version. Timetable explanation for SimRail.pdf

it's the same in the EN57.

easier to have the conductor tell you over the radio that you can depart now.

and you lose points for flushing the toilet in a station!

as mentioned above, most Polish trains do not have the shunting / auxiliary controls mounted by the side windows that trains in Germany have, so you'd need very long arms to be looking out the left hand window and operating the power wheel and brake lever. It just takes 1 or 2 key presses to get the view looking backwards from the front of the train, i do this all the time, it'd get annoying fast to have to keep clicking with the mouse to open the window, select the look out option, move the view to be looking backwards, where as pressing number 4 you are looking back along the train in 1/4 of a second.

So, today i had a little play, i dug out some old 'minimus AVR' boards that i run KADE on, which gives you a USB A plu with a PCB on it, that you connect switches to the solder pads, then program it in KADE to make it into a keyboard, a game pad, a mouse/trackball/spinner and so on... it only does digital inputs, so no axis. it was brought out about 10 years ago for the MAME scene... arcade emulation. So, i set the KADE programmer up to set 2 of the input pins send the keyboard key for power up and power down. Programmed the board, connected my mini EU07 wheel to it, which is just 2 microswitches, one is tapped each time i rotate the wheel right, the other tapped when i rotate it left, so it should be just as if i was tapping the keyboard keys. I opened notepad, and spun the wheel fast to the right, i got a nice line of letters which i counted... exactly 43, i spun the wheel back to zero even faster, exactly 43 letters that in the sim would move the wheel left. I have no problems with contact bounce, skipped inputs or anything, i always get exactly the number of key inputs i need. Started SimRail in the EU07, moved my mini wheel to the right, if i go more than about 3 clicks a second the wheel in the sim stops moving. It seems to be the new animation that needs time to move the wheel 'smoothly' similar to how we can no longer hold down the ZEW buttons on the radio, there's now an animation that releases the button after one beep, even if your still holding the keyboard key down. i know there are a few people trying to make controllers for SimRail, and this new animation thing has just messed things up for us big time. Personally i preferred the old way, where the controls moved instantly when you operated them, and you could keep the ZEW buttons held down and make it beep 3 or 4 times before releasing.

well, the idea of leaning out the window was to lean from the drivers seat, I don't bother with it anyway, as i drive with TrackIr all the time, and that only works on the driving / in cab camera, if i go through the process of dragging the right hand window down, clicking then selecting 'lean out' then wait for the animation of me to do so... i'm looking forwards, and TrackIr is not active, so to look back along the train to see if it's safe to close the doors, i need to drag the view with the mouse.... Much easier to just press number 4, and it's looking back along the train kind of as if i was looking ot the window... press 4 again and it switches to looking back along the left hand side of the train (tho on the EU07's etc, number 4 has you looking back on the left side first... someone needs to get all these interactions synced with all the trains really) Re the mirror, lots of things are being changed with hot fixes and updates right now, so one of the updates has knocked the mirror camera's view off, it used to be correct, but the other night i was in the EP08, and the top half of the right hand mirror was a view of the driving desk in the cab!! bottom half was back along the platform as it should have been.