For controlling the wagon animations and the camera system it’s necessary to have a microcontroller board with an integrated ESP32 in the middle of the showcase. The program code algorithm for the ESP32 has been provided by students as well as the circuit board itself, which was produced in the school workshops in Croatia. In Germany then, during the final meeting, the different parameters were clearly defined to reach proper function. The board layout and all the needed information have been published for public use within our project web.
INSTALLATION GUIDE ESP32 Microcontroller |
PROGRAM CODE ESP32 Microcontroller |
Feel free to ask our GitHub for the latest updates!
Our project root server is the heart of our control system and is provided by a leading online service provider. In contrast to a web server for simple Internet pages, such a kind of server includes an operating system so that our program code can be executed. In order to communicate with the animated wagons and the camera system via user web interface, we installed a Mosquitto MQTT broker that is linked to a Mongo database. The program code was written by using the compilable Google Go programming language, which is available as open source.
INSTALLATION PACKAGE MQTT Broker / Mongo DB Project Root Server |
The program code stored at our project root server was written using the compilable Google Go programming language, which is available free of charge as open source. Once the user is selecting a wagon, the user web interface is sending a signal to the project root server, where an MQTT broker is installed, which in turn activates the ESP32 expander of the selected wagon via the Internet. Simultaneous animation requests are processed serially in a queue managed by our MQTT broker linked to a Mongo database. The user web interface was designed with HTML and special effects were implemented with Java.
Our project root server is operated by
Hetzner Online GmbH
We chose the "CAX11 - Cloud Server" version: