AVR-Chat

Hi Chuck,

Well, it was a thought.  As far as the voltage goes, you could probably 
use any AC voltage greater than about 10 volts or so.  I've seen others 
recommend 24v here.  That should work fine with X-10.  See the circuit in 
that PIC app note for getting 5 volts from the AC power.

I'm still fascinated by this X-10 technology and have been playing around 
with it.

X-10 is rather slow.  I didn't know what kind of data rate you needed.  If 
you're just trying to signal the location of the train every so often, it 
would work with a single byte being sent.

You might consider an RF link using one of the 380 MHz transceiver chips 
that are on the market, and eliminate the wires for the data transfer 
completely.  I don't know if they have a range of 1000 ft, though. I know 
they work up to a couple hundred feet.

Zack

On Tue, 1 Feb 2005, Chuck Hackett wrote:

> 
> > From: Zack Widup
> >
> > Just a thought ... you can maybe use an implementation of
> > X-10 technology and power your devices at the same time. But
> > you'd have to use AC to power your devices.
> 
> Hi Zack,
> 
> I looked at X-10 but rejected it for several reasons.  One is that these ride-on
> railroad tracks are many times located in public parks.  I doubt if they would
> take kindly to running 120 VAC around and the conduit required would add to the
> costs fast - and the grounds people have been known to sever cables when digging
> in shrubs, etc. :-)
> 
> Another reason is that (to my knowledge) X-10 uses a "best effort" delivery
> method (I think the message is sent three times) and there is no high level
> acknowledgement.  This ACK could be added on top but my message traffic will
> require a larger bandwidth than X-10 can support.
>