TUTORIAL Custom power pickups

[Arlo]

Still making these?

I’m trying to figure out a good solution to power my train setup.  My kitchen has 2 big skylights above, and that area of the ceiling has a ledge above the counters that is 6-36 inches deep.  Think of one of those ledges/shelves above cabinets where old ladies display a bunch of old plates and stupid stuff like that.  OK?

Yeah, so i’ve put train tracks up there.  It’s a big circle like 40 feet in diameter.  Looks cool.

The issue is power.  Now, there is power up there, a couple of outlets.   But train power.  Battery packs for PoweredUp / Power Functions sucks because I have to get out a stepladder to get up to the trains to change out batteries.  That’s kind of awful.

So, what i’m interested in doing coming up with a system that uses rechargeable batteries.

1.  Get some https://shop.fxbricks.com/pages/fx-track Powered Rail.  Not for the whole track mind, you, I’d like to create a little rail yard for locomotives to go and recharge their batteries.  This area would have the much more expensive Fx-Track, BUT only needs a  short length of it for each locomotive

2.  Use https://shop.fxbricks.com/products/pfx-brick PFX-Bricks to control the trains.  This would give me some great programming options.

3.  Use rechargeable lithium batteries for power.

4.  Possibly build this system to deal with the different voltages of the FX-track vs the battery.  https://brickmodelrailroader.com/index.php/2017/03/10/hybrid-pf9v-systems/.   However, I might not actually need it since the locomotives won’t actually run on the FX-tracks for very long, only when they are getting out of the rail yard.  OR, I ought to be able to make the FX-tracks capable of ONLY charging the batteries and never directly powering the wheels.  That would make things a little simpler.  

5.  Can the PFX-brick tell when the battery is getting low?  I need to find this out.  Detecting that will be critical.

Basically, the idea is I could have a rail yard where 3, 4, 6, whatever locomotives could go to park and recharge their batteries.  I could be running 1 or 2 or maybe more locomotives on my track (40+ freaking feet of it!).  Then, when the PFX-Brick senses low charge on the locomotive, it would have to operate track switches to the send the locomotive to the correct parking area to recharge.  

Lots of moving parts to this system to figure out.  The switch controls, the batteries, etc.  But, power pickup is also critical!  So, i’m wondering if your system is still available?

[Electricsteam]

What a blast from the past, I forgot about this helpful post from 11 years ago this month, I've been working on new 9v power system as my own personal project, working on grabbing the right size of wheels and searching for the "pizza cutter" variety originally listed, I think I've found them but amazon and ebay have ruined my trust of smaller websites that sell stuff.  

 

Right now the only think I can make a FUNCTIONAL copy of is 9V track.   Copper foil tape 1/4in  is the perfect size to tape to regular PF track to tape to the rails and give power without issue.