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Big Bear xP is a new cross-platform version of the Big Bear model rail controller. This video outlines how to use and configure the current prototype. See also Big Bear Website ...

by Peter Thurston A railway modeller is in his loft firing up his Flying Scotsman, setting the route to Edinburgh and off she steams. He, and it is almost certainly a ‘he’, is controlling his trains and signals using what is known as Digital Command and Control or DCC for short. Electronic signals travel from his control panel to the tracks where computer chips in the trains a ...

The re-write and modernisation of Big Bear Model Rail software reach's a milestone with the first successful end to end, screen to model, layout demonstration.

The chances are that you, or someone you know, received an Amazon Alexa for Christmas. If not an Alexa, maybe a Google Assistant, or some other smart speaker. Yes, love them or loathe them, these little boxes of electronic joy are slowly creeping into our lives and it’s approaching the time that we need to ask, should my business be making moves to exploit the potential of voic ...

It's time to start playing with those trains. To prove that we can control the layout remotely, we will be using an Azure IoT hub to send commands to a program linked up with the railway and we'll make things happen. In theory, this could be done by someone on the other side of the world!

So, onto Alexa itself, no way we can get to control the train until we have a good handle on how to program that voice from the black tube (or black ‘tub’, if you have an Echo)! Working with Alexa isn't tricky, you do need some programming experience and the programming language of choice is a variant of JavaScript called Node.js but other languages like Python are supported. O ...

Blue Tang's long established easy to use support tracking system, Razordesk, updated to support modern browsers and databases.

Way back, long before the days we lived in virtual bubble, kids (and not so kids) had train sets which here in Great Britain, would have been Hornby. Mostly the track would be a loop spread out on the carpet, with a cat waiting ready to pounce in the moving trains ...

Lets kick off with the railway itself, this runs in a loop around what was a spare bedroom and now, a home office or, as I prefer to call it, 'The Creative Suite'. As you see I punched a hole in the wall to make a tunnel through a cupboard. I have a reputation for making tunnels through walls, previously to allow my cats access to the outside world. It was easier than cutting a ...

Before we launch off and start writing code (no matter how tempting that is), we ought to think about what it should be doing. Good old user requirements. For a start, lets keep it simple, this is, after all a demo on a model railway and not controlling real trains on railtrack. Though some might argue that wouldn't be a bad idea. The first most basic thing, is to start and st ...