The new Kato Pocket Line controller

[Welshbloke]

Mine arrived yesterday, and I've had a very brief play with it.

 

First impressions - the controller comes in a bubble wrap bag inside the usual cardboard box. The item itself feels well made, the controls move positively and the plastic feels slightly better quality than the standard blue Kato controllers. It's tiny but not so small as to make operations awkward, you will need to hold it steady with one hand while adjusting controls with the other but it's very usable.

 

No cables are included, but USB A to C or C to C are readily available as are mains adapters if you don't have an old phone charger or a power bank knocking around. Just avoid the cheap and nasty ones as they often have lethally bad electrical designs. If you buy from a large chain or get a genuine one from a recognised manufacturer you should be fine, they've got too much at stake to risk selling dangerous appliances.

 

I haven't tried it with an ammeter yet (I will do as I have a few of those USB test meters) but it seems to cope with USB-PD power supplies. It doesn't trigger the PD function (this was explicitly stated in the advertising - 5v input only) but at the same time it evidently has the components to trigger their delivering a plain 5v supply, some devices which don't do PD lack the ability to do this. So it should be fine with anything which has a USB-C plug on the end.

 

Amusingly it happily moved a Heljan O scale diesel loco at a reasonable pace for shunting, these are supposed to need big beefy controllers due to having two chunky motors and being seriously heavy! I can't comment on how long the little controller would have coped as I only have about two and a half metres of O track at home, but it coped with this very silly test. If a loco will move at a reasonable speed at about 40% of a standard 12v controller's output it should be quite happy with this little thing.