The Randall Museum in San Francisco hosts a large HO-scale model model railroad. Created by the Golden Gate Model Railroad Club starting in 1961, the layout was donated to the Museum in 2015. Since then I have started automatizing trains running on the layout. I am also the model railroad maintainer. This blog describes various updates on the Randall project and I maintain a separate blog for all my electronics not directly related to Randall.
2022-02-08 - Train Vision Computer Update
Category RandallThe original Vision computer is back on the layout, running the latest version of the train-motion software:
I had issues with that Lenovo Yoga 15 at the end of last year and I quickly exchanged it for a smaller X1 I had as a spare at home. I’m glad to be able to have the Yoga 15 back on the layout as the screen is larger, and it’s also the most ridiculously good looking screen I’ve seen on a Lenovo line so far. Super sharp, rich in color and contrast. It really shines in this video display application. I don’t want to diss my beloved Lenovo X1 screen, it’s just that the X1 screen is matte and really works well for work and long coding sessions, whereas the Yoga screen is more vivid in color and obviously targeted more at displaying videos.
Here’s a description of the display when running the train-motion software:
On the picture, Live Cam 1 has a yellow highlight around the video to indicate that motion has been detected in this live video stream, and we can indeed see the yellow UP passenger train in view.
Eventually I want to move the cameras 2 & 3 to more interesting parts of the layout, yet before I can do that I’m waiting for the museum’s maintenance staff to fix the overhead lighting issue.
The interesting thing is that overall we use 60% of the CPU on this machine (Lenovo Yoga 15 with i5-5200U @ 2.2 GHz):
