About HJBricks

A site about creating controllers for your Lego and/or alternative brick layout using Rocrail and ESP’s.

And blogging about visits to fairs.

This is about visiting fairs, building my layout and creating automation elements using, primary ESP32’s.

We are 3d printing cases, using FreeCad, and printing them with filament or resin.

Designing pcb’s using KiCad, using 0603, smaller will be impossible for me ;-)

We are using hugo as static site builder and the Docsy theme for blogging and documenting stuff.

Coding

Coding is done in C/C++ and using platformio. The primary repository is my local gitlab, with some automation to upload the generated code to a web server so the firmware can automatically be updated. The secondary is on github. OTA will still be possible.

If you want a new feature, or find a bug, please report on github, there is going to be a documentation section on reporting bugs and feature requests.

It is also possible to automatically download new configurations for the various device types.

There are some python helpers that do the version number generation in the code and a tool that creates from a JSON configuration a binary configuration and an sum so the device can check if there is a newer version.

Devices

The first device is a Rocrail remote called rrmaus, it automatically discovers the Rocrail plan and allows you to control:

  • locomotives
  • switches
  • signals
  • outputs

The second device is going to be a Rocrail layout item, it can control:

  • lights in houses
    • normal lights
    • candles
    • tv
    • street lights
  • motorized devices like windmills, using a PF connector
  • switches (using servo’s)
  • signals
  • decoupler