So my background is IT, a software engineer / network engineer / devops / technical architect / solution architect of 10+ years and I've always been intrigued with the DCC system that our club layouts use and what could be picked up "off the wire".
Using a NCE DCC Analyser (now unfortunately discontinued) with a Serial port on, I managed to be able to do just that, seeing the DCC Id, Speed Step and Direction of a loco moving was pretty cool.
We started off storing this data in a database and querying the movement data, coupled (no pun intended) with a seperate database with train information in, we combine both datasets when we query the movement data to give the following output on a screen for the public to see. See below.
We're able to "see" a loco appear on the TV around 5 seconds once it's Speed Step being greater than 1. We were able to handle, single direction and dual direction trains with separate data eg DMU on the Up and Down with different headcodes and train information.
It's first outing was at the Great Electric Train Show at Gaydon as part of the Mostyn layout in early October this year, having been kept under wraps for a few weeks.
It's first outing went well, we had a memory leak on the Saturday which was fixed pretty quickly and due to the amount of data it was storing (everything) we decided to ignore anything where the Speed Step was at 0 for the time being.
Over a 2 day exhibition, we we're storing 70k+ movement records where 7k were where the Speed Step > 0.
I have a document covering the entire system, which I can grab and publish here if anybody is interested. It's a work in progress but anybody interested in knowing how it's been built or anything, just get in touch.
If you saw it working on Mostyn at the GETS, I'd love to know what you thought. We had plenty of people talk and ask questions about it over the weekend.
Edit - Attached Solution architecture document.
Thanks
Gareth
DCCTrainInfoSystem_v0.1.pdf