Tomytec 'Car-system'

[Guest ___]

Let's hope maybe this give KATO an idea for their the Unitram.

[cteno4]

Looking at those videos etc am thinking will have to investigate more. Will need to see exactly how the guidewire is fitted and what metal it is- custom made streets /levelcrossing is in the back of my head for some reason. 

 

Mike,

 

you can use plain old steel wire for the guide wire, like 20-22g. just has to be magnetically conductive (ie stainless wont work or copper). the steering mech appears to be identical to the faller mech they licensed.

 

you can run the wire in plaster roads or even under thin styrene (like 020). ive played a lot with my faller bus by just taping wire under thin chipboard or styrene sheets to see what you can do with it in terms of turns etc.

 

you can even do things like a loop back where you do a big turn that comes back to the original input line. basically like an eye screw shape. just have to leave a gap at where it connects to the original path after doing the loop so that the bus does not get confused at the Y split.

 

i even made a crude point/switch. you can just move the wire between two different lines.  

 

basically tomytec's pull in bus stop is the same idea as it just bends the wire into the turnout lane when you pull the slider over.

 

i got the faller to cross a set of rails. first attempt was just using unitrak crossing with wires leading up to either side of just the track part (ie not the grade wings) with styrene sheets level with the track on either side. worked most of the time but a few times it would bump on the track and loose its way on the other side. i did a quick fiddle with a piece of unitrak and a strip of cardstock between the rails with a small piece of guide wire between the tracks and that seemed to keep the bus well on track. of course still need to also make the train run through this well so thats a bit of fiddly work to keep both functioning well, but dont see any reason it cant be done.

 

its really great to just be able to just experiment with your road course to get an idea of how it will look if you are not using the tomytec road way.

 

if you have road already down you should be able to just use the dremel to route a little notch in your road and lay the wire and then patch it up.

 

appears the magnets you put under the road trip the pause circuit in the bus itself. there was talk of two speeds but not really evident in the current videos.

 

basic steering mech seems to be exactly the same as the faller, but they now appear to have put all the start/stop into a more intelligent IC circuit than the old faller which just had a reed switch that turned off the bus while the external electromagnet was on.

 

one bummer is the batteries, kind of a waste to be chucking a lot of button cells, but you can keep the busses running. faller used a small nicad.

 

i do hope they start selling just the busses separate soon!

 

my preorder went bye bye with HW so waiting for the restock at HS.

 

cheers

 

jeff

[rankodd]

I've got a pair of bus systems that shipped yesterday, by SAL unfortunately :( I am looking forward to seeing what I can do with them, though.

 

I'm a little disappointed that the magnets stop the bus for a pre-determined time. I'm building working streetlights, and I was envisioning being able to time electromagnents under the road to force the bus to obey the stoplights...

 

As far as batteries go, I've order sets of 50 from Dealextreme for ~$5/set. Long lead times for shipping mean that running out would leave the busses stranded for several weeks, so I stocked up. I checked my invoice and it turns out I picked up 5 sets, for 250 batteries. I just hope I like the busses... :confused5:

[cteno4]

not absolutely sure that the pause is done by the bus, but not seen any other indication that there are electromagnets in the road set to do this (would have to be in that little bus turnout section). the other permanent magnets you can place in the streets also lead me to believe that its all in the bus.

 

wonder if they have any changes you can do to the pause time. would be great if you could switch it to the faller style to be stopped while field is on and go when field is turned off.

 

yes problem will be keeping the bus stopped at lights or at a crossing properly.

 

suppose you could try to disable the pause circuit in the bus and just do you own reed switch to the battery and use electromagnets in the roadway to roll your own faller system. problem is the tomytec is all one big unit now. the faller was basically separate pieces for each thing (motor/gear box, battery, plug, reed switch, steering mech) and you could do a lot of fiddling or tearing apart and rebuilding if you wanted.

 

cant way to get one of these and play with it though, looks like they put a lot of work in it and it runs slower than the faller one does (except when the batteries are low in the faller!)

 

cheers

 

jeff

[cteno4]

interesting i was just looking at mikro antriebe a german company that makes lots of tiny motors and gears and they have a magnetic tape for making guide paths for faller HO cars.

 

http://www.mikroantriebe.de/

 

cheers

 

jeff

[rankodd]

interesting i was just looking at mikro antriebe a german company that makes lots of tiny motors and gears and they have a magnetic tape for making guide paths for faller HO cars.

 

http://www.mikroantriebe.de/

 

cheers

 

jeff

 

My first inclination was that it was an over-engineered, unnecessary idea. Then I watched the video - laying tape would be SOOO much easier than fiddling with under-roadbed wire...

[Mudkip Orange]

I'm definitely of the school of thought that "a bus moving through static traffic is less realistic than static traffic." The moving bus calls attention to the fact that the rest of the scene is static.

 

 

Although it could be fun to try to program a roundabout. You'd need some sort of occupancy detection where the "stop" magnets on the approaches only activate if there's already a vehicle in the circle, otherwise the bus continues on through.

[westfalen]

I'm wondering if the guide wire could be placed underneath my Unitram road sections.

[rankodd]

I'm wondering if the guide wire could be placed underneath my Unitram road sections.

 

How thick are they?

 

As long as they're thin enough for the magnet on the bus to pick the wire up, and there isn't other bits of metal running under the path of the bus then it should run fine...

[westfalen]

I'm wondering if the guide wire could be placed underneath my Unitram road sections.

 

How thick are they?

 

As long as they're thin enough for the magnet on the bus to pick the wire up, and there isn't other bits of metal running under the path of the bus then it should run fine...

 

The Kato road pieces are fairly thick so I might have to scribe a groove on the underside to lay the wire in. My Unitram set is at the club at the moment so I don't have any of it in front of me but if I get my hands on a bus set I think it is something worth experimenting with.

[cteno4]

The Kato road pieces are fairly thick so I might have to scribe a groove on the underside to lay the wire in. My Unitram set is at the club at the moment so I don't have any of it in front of me but if I get my hands on a bus set I think it is something worth experimenting with.

 

yeah its like 060 so i think it will be a bit too thick to get a good grab. at 040 when i was testing the faller it started to have troubles. but lets see how strong the rare earth magnet is in the tomytec steering mech!

 

you could probably use the router guide on a dremel with a small router bit to cut a slight channel in the under side of the road surface and thru any of the cross bracing. issue will be if you want them to end at each street section. this should work, just make sure they line up at the same point so you can interchange your pieces. youll need to use the curb lane, but it looks like it should be able to make it around the corners between the curb and track.

 

cheers

 

jeff

[RAILCAT]

Interestingly the tram track has a grove already moulded into the underside

for a steel wire as per the roadway.

I imagine the bus wheels would get stuck in the rails though.

[KenS]

My Bus System Basic Set A (two of them) arrived today.  Unfortunately they don't come with batteries, something I figured out too late, so I had to content myself with taking some pictures.

 

The set includes one motor unit, two body shells (one painted, one unpainted), eight 70mm straight sections (three are the bus stop), six C103 30-degree curves, six C140 30-degree curves, and some miscellaneous parts (three magnets for placing under the roadway, some signs for the bus stop, some clips for attaching roadway to parallel roadway or to the bus stop mechanism).

 

With one set, you can make a slightly skewed oval single-lane road (picture on back of box), with two you can make a dual-lane oval as I did.

 

Included in the set are three sets of adapter clips that attach to the motor unit to adapt it to different size body shells. There's a sheet (entirely in Japanese) listing which clips to use with which bodies.

[KenS]

More pictures.

[to2leo]

Wow Tomytec is very smart in offering a set of two different curve degrees.  That way, one has to buy two sets to make non-skewed oval.

Some smart marketing there!

 

Thanks for sharing the photos, Ken.  I really hope this technology will have cross hobby appeal to car collectors.

[CaptOblivious]

You could arrange the curves to make easements, instead of making a skewed oval.

 

 

Interesting that the straights have diagonal grooves under them, I suppose making it possible to simulate lane changes and cross-overs?

 

Even more interesting that the motor unit has a sophisticated-looking PCB with a microcontroller on it…that must be the logic for stopping and delaying? I wonder what else is programmed into that chip?

[bill937ca]

I think this is two sets.

 

 

Anyways ATB Models has a whole site in Japanese on buses with model and prototype photos.

[cteno4]

ken get to radio shack and get those batteries! want a report on how these function!

 

it does still appear all the programming for the stop, pause and acceleration is done onboard the bus in its circuit.

 

does there seem to be any switches you can set on the bus? im wondering if they have a switch that sets the bus to just pause when tripped by the magnet and another state where it stops while the magnet is there and starts once the field is removed (ie an electro magnet for controlled stops at crossing etc).

 

also any sign of the two speeds mentioned in some blogs pre release?

 

cheers

 

jeff

[bill937ca]

Interesting that the straights have diagonal grooves under them, I suppose making it possible to simulate lane changes and cross-overs?

 

Wouldn't those diagonal grooves be for the bus stop function?

[cteno4]

it looks like the diagonals are potential paths for the wire track. you can see in the two plates that make the bus pullout section the wire track going off the center track on the diagonal. looks to be missing the wire then on the center after the pull in. im thinking the sliding mechanism when put in the go position fill in this gap and keeps the bus on the straight center path. if you pull it to the stop position then the bus follows the wire track which goes off on the diagonal into the pull off at the side.

 

still curious how the stop circuit in the bus gets triggered...

 

cheers

jeff

[lordwinslow2]

I think this is two sets.

 

 

Anyways ATB Models has a whole site in Japanese on buses with model and prototype photos.

 

That is kinda cool, can't wait to see more layouts with this system.  I was at a train show last week, where a couple people had adapted the Faller units into their N scale layouts or N-Trak units.

 

Winslow

[KenS]

Here's how it works, as least as I've figured it out so far.

 

First, I'll note that the bus runs reliably. When put on the track sometimes the wheels were off-center, and it would drive off the road. But once it was on and following the wire, it never failed. And it negotiated uneven track fairly well (my roadway was laid across two boards that weren't quite level where the met).

 

The only control on the bus is a power switch to turn the motor off when not in use.

 

The set comes with three circular magnets in plastic cases.  Two are designed to clip to the underside of the track, the third to clip to the "entry" end of the bus stop slider.  All three only fit in one orientation. There's also a long metal strip (probably a magnet) in the bus stop slider. Finally, there is the slider switch, in the "stop" position the slider is under the marked bus stop, in the "go" position it's off to the right. I noted one problem: when clipped on the C103 curve, the bus didn't seem to react to the magnet; it may have been too far off to the side, but I need to do more testing.

 

Regardless of any controls, the bus always pulls to the side at the stop.  If the slider is set to go and there's no circular magnet on the slider, it just pulls in, drives through, and pulls out, which doesn't look too prototypical (I'll avoid snarky comments about bus drivers).

 

With the slider in the stop position and no small circular magnet, the bus pulls in and stops, apparently until the slider is moved to the "go" position (I didn't test that too rigorously though).

 

With the small circular magnet in position and the slider in the stop position, the bus pulls in, stops, waits about 7 seconds, and then pulls out.

 

The other two magnets are speed controls.  Apparently these only function when clipped to the underside of the road to the right of the bus, so they're effectively directional; a bus going in one direction will react to a magnet, a bus going the other way on the same road segment will ignore it.

 

What they do is a speed toggle.  If the bus is going slow, it speeds up, if it's going fast it slows down.  The recommended configuration is to put one magnet before the stop (so it slows down) and another beyond it, so after leaving at slow speed, it speeds up. The bus takes about one bus-length to react to the magnet after passing it.

 

When the batteries were fresh, fast and slow were fairly different, but the difference became less obvious fairly quickly. Still, there was a difference.

 

Bottom line: there's no real way to vary behavior with the supplied set, since it depends on where the magnets are clipped under the track. I think there's a lot of potential here, but out-of-the-box it's lacking in play potential. For background activity in a scene, this is probably all you

 

I shot some video, and will eventually put something up on the 'tube, but it will probably take a few days.

 

Oh, and the 'Shack really let me down.  The only "LR44"s they had were actually SR44s, at $5.50 each.  Fortunately a local office supply store had real LR44s at $1.50 each.  You can get these a lot cheaper in bulk from Amazon, and I'm going to have to order some.

[bill937ca]

More info and photos of the back side of the road pieces on this Atlas Forum thread.

[rankodd]

Does Tomix not include any batteries at all? Seems a bit cheap of them.

 

I'm glad to hear that there's a way to make the bus stop, and not move again until you want it to. My plans for making the busses react to my stoplights may not be futile after all...

[cteno4]

Ken,

 

thanks for the report. thats odd i thought one of the expo videos showed that in the go position the bus went straight thru and did not do the turn in.

 

so it appears there are two magnetic sensors. the short pulse on the speed one gears it up or down. long hard draw of the slider magnet alone does the total stop till removed (this is like the faller car system), but then the secondary field at the other end triggers the auto pause.

 

well then this means they did build in a way to eventually do electromagnet controls so you can stop the bus for as long as you need at a crossing or other auto traffic control.

 

still think they could have routed the wire with the slide switch so you could either pull in or go straight thru. i was able to do a lot of fun little things like that with wire taped to the bottom of some 020 styrene and just slips of chipboard to move the wires.

 

will look forward to more info!

 

cheers

 

jeff