Recently, I have been building a program to provide routing information for my Model Railroad. The software has been developed using VASmalltalk 8.6.1 and utilises the Seaside add on to provide the web interface. The web interface is designed to switch style sheets between a normal browser and an iPad so that I can take the information with me to the railroad. The package provides notification of the flow of trains across the layout according to a defined timetable. It also provides a freight car routing facility to enable me to build freight trains to timetable with random freight car constituents. The car routing takes into account the available space on each of the layouts industrial spurs along with noting the appropriate choice of freight car type - box car, flat car, gondola, etc.
I have covered the usage and facilities in some depth on my Model Railroad blog. If you are interested, you can check all of this out from the following two links.
If any of you are into Model Railroads then your comments would be welcome.
The railroad itself is run using DCC (Digital Command Control) where each loco has a decoder built in that responds to its unique address so all the locos can be operated individually without any special electrical modifications to the track. In addition, each loco has sound capabilities so it sounds like the real thing when moving. The turntable also has decoders built in so that the routing can be set up through the DCC controller. Even better than that, there is a Java based package out there called JMRI (Java Model Railroad Interface) that runs on my iMac. This knows about my locos and the turntable. The JMRI provides a Smart Phone server so that a program call WIThrottle on my iPhone can control the railroad. So, I wander about with my iPhone controlling the trains and the turntable whilst taking routing instructions from my iPad - with a big chunk of this using VASmalltalk!
Last little bit of information. My copy of Smalltalk runs under Windows XP hosted on a Parallels set up on my iMac. What fun!
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David
Totally Objects
Doing Smalltalk since 1989
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