Smart Holiday Express Train

Hardware
1

Just thinking of getting the christmas decorations down and wanted to get everything smart. The lights are easy but I was wondering about the Holiday Express train around the bottom of the tree.

The train it battery operated so ideal would be to hack a Xiaomi Aqua wired switch for on/off functionality connected straight to the Xiaomi gateway. But i’ve just opened one up and the PCB is way to big to fit in the limited space that will be available on the train.

My next idea was to buy a new train that runs off mains and just hookup a sonoff basic but apparently they don’t appear to exist.

So i guess i’m looking for some inspiration on how to make the train smart.

Thanks

2

I run some old O-27 trains and was thinking of doing something along these lines:

3

Very nice. Bit to involved and expensive vs my £20 battery train that will be out for a month

4

I can understand that. I have mine semi-permanently mounted on an 8’x’ table I made. I was big into it all then kinda tapered off. Train is setup and runs under original power/controllers. I may still one day get back to it for automation purposes.

5

I would love to get into it all i’m sure there’s some awesome automations out there for them but we just don’t have the space.

I was kinda hoping someone would have a solution to basically making a battery operated device on/off switch smart.

6

ESP8266? You may even be able to piggyback it off the existing batteries of the train. Not sure if you can trigger a relay from one though, I imagine you should be able to?
Or ESP32 (I think) is an even lower power version.

Edit- It looks possible according to this:

7

That could work something like a nodeMCU but not sure how much impact that would have on the battery life.

I will investigate further i think

8

Search on youtube for “esp8266 battery” and you’ll find loads of tips for making it enter deep sleep when not getting pinged so imagine the impact would actually be negligible. :slight_smile:

9

FWIW current LEGO trains can be IR controlled.

I found this write up. http://www.internetoflego.com/lego-train-automation-ir-power-functions-with-nodejs-and-lirc/ home assistant also supports lirc so maybe it’d work? (Don’t have any of this, just had vaguely remembered LEGO had switched to IR control)

10

I know this thread is ancient but just wondered if you had been successful with this? It’s something I’d like to do and have the exact same train - a bit of Googling found this thread but not a lot else on the subject so I thought I’d chance my arm and just ask.
:slight_smile:

11

I had the same question. There must be an easy way to just send on and off commands to the trains?