Welcome to the home of Lew’s Duino Gear ™, Intelligent Electronics designed for Model Railroads, and the home of LCOS — the Layout Control Operating System. Our products empower you to build a complete, semi-automated control system for model railroad layouts of any size or scale.
duinoNodes: the I/O Boards You Didn’t Know You Need
If you are using Arduino technologies on your layout, no doubt you have run into the big limitations of all Arduino boards: too few digital input/output ports with relatively low current handling limits. Even the MEGA with its 53 pins can only run 10 output pins at full power (@ maximum continuous power of 20 mA per port) at any given time, because of the 200 mA limit on board current handling capacity!
What if you:
- Need more output ports than your boards can provide?
- Need to handle more current than any port or the board can manage?
- Need to run relays, small motors or other inductive devices?
- Need to read more digital inputs than there are available ports?
Lew’s Duino Gear duinoNodes solve those problems and more! Every model railroading hobbyist working with Arduino microcontrollers needs these boards! Find out more here.
Plug & Play Layout Control Has Arrived!
LCOS, the engine behind Lew’s Duino Gear Plug & Play Layout Control System, will change model railroad layouts forever!
Why? You already have sophisticated, plug and play control over sound equipped locomotives, but along the way the layout itself has been an afterthought. In the prototype world, the environment exists independently and is something the train has to contend with. Why aren’t layouts built around the same principle? Because it was a hard thing to do.
Not any more! Now you can have a layout that runs on its own rules and interacts with trains in a prototypical way! LCOS brings layout control into the 21st century, uniting all the elements of a layout — turnout motors, crossings, signals, lighting and discreet animations — into a complex organism driven by a fast clock, allowing layout-wide simulation of a prototypical day.
Here are some Key Features and Capabilities of Lew’s Duino Gear ™ LCOS layout control products::
- Create control panels with buttons, switches and status/feedback indicators
- INEXPENSIVELY Control up to 2044 turnouts from your DCC throttle without having to buy individual decoders.
- Run all common turnout motors, including stall motor, single coil, twin coil and servos. Set frog power and reversing relays according to turnout position.
- Track trains with block occupancy sensors.
- Automate Signals (1, 2 or 3 aspect) according to block occupancy and turnout positions.
- Automate Crossing Gates .
- Automate Reversing relays
- Create and animate extensive Layout lighting
- Run active layout animations
- Run a variable ratio fast clock for both layout time display and layout automation, such as lighting control. Driven by the fast clock signal, your layout can dynamically respond to time changes from day to night and back again.
- The Configurator app works with you to make setup point and click easy.
- Compatible with all locomotive control systems.
- The best part: no scripting or programming — you don’t have to be an electrical engineer or computer programmer to use the Lew’s Duino Gear Layout Control System!
If you are ready to learn more, see About the Layout Control Operating System, or for an even deeper dive, see the LCOS Manual.