XWL are economic additional wireless throttles to control locomotives in a system with Xpressnet bus (NanoX, Lokmaus, Lenz, etc.) with the following characteristics:
- Control of locomotives in the addresses 1 to 99
- Control of lights and functions F1 y F4
- Control of speed and change of direction by pushbuttons
- Emergency Stop button
- Guest mode, restricted functions
- Low power mode after 3 minutes without use
- Up to 8 throttles with one base station, with indication of reception and dispatch of commands.
- Selection of the Xpressnet bus address of the base station between 1 and 31
XWL uses the economic 433,92MHz radio data modules with SAW oscillator and AM modulation, are unidirectional (there is only communication from sender to receiver, not the reverse). Used with an antenna of only 17cm, have sufficient transmission range for a model railway. Between other are manufactured by AUREL and Telecontrolli. Also avaiable an infrared version.
Base station is very simple governed by the PIC16F690, has some DIP-switches to select the address on the Xpressnet bus and a LED indication of receiving data from the radio module and LED for dispatch of commands to the command station. You can use module RR3 of Telecontrolli or the RX of AUREL. Base station supports up to 8 XWL throttles
I made the throttles for two versions, one with the PIC16F628 and modules TX Aurel, and one with the PIC16F690 and modules RT4 of Telecontrolli. The throttle has two LED displays to show the number of locomotive and other information and six buttons. It gets power from a 9V (6LR61) battery.
If we want a guest use our XWL throttle to control a single locomotive in our model layout and not mistakenly select another of the running locomotives, we can set the XWL throttle in Guest mode, so only you can control the locomotive assigned in the throttle and its functions. STOP button only produce the emergency stop of the selected locomotive, not the Emergency off of the layout.
Download the manual, program and PCB here in PDF format, if you want to build your own PCB or identify componets see this tutorials.
The XWL-IR throttles are cheaper but had the same features of the XWL throttles but using infrared instead of radio modules. The range is more limited and require a visual contact between the transmitter and receiver.
Installing instead of radio modules the necessary components for infrared transmision, I just had to adapt the firmware of the throttles to generate the 38KHz carrier for the infrared receiver. Thanks to Leon for testing and send me the photos of his design
The firmware and the schematics to do the adaptation can be downloaded here
XWL created by F.M.Caņada .gif)
