The new Faller Car System Digital with Satellites for Automatic Vehicle Location

During the great model railway exhibition in Cologne, Germany, Pilentum Television had taken some video records from the new car system made by Faller. The famous Faller car system was updated to a digitally controlled system. Therefore, it is called “Faller Car System Digital”, now. The system offers a higher degree of reliability as well as a high degree of individual road traffic on the model railway layout or model street layout. Ultrasonic signals which are exchanged between the cars and the satellites, accurately determine the position of each vehicle. It is an automatic vehicle location for scale model cars.

The software behind the system running on a computer calculates values for the car’s distance control. There is a fully automatic control for high traffic on the street layout, now. Similar to track plans at model train layouts, you can generate road maps with the miniature car system by Faller. Please, take a look at the computer display at 1:20 in this video file. The software at the computer display is presenting all information and settings clearly and graphically. The small model cars and the system are in permanent contact via a radio link. Via the radio link, each car receives driving commands and reports information, such as the state of charge or the current driving stage, back to the system. With this wireless connection, any function’s change is possible during driving.

Unfortunately, the satellites, which are used for vehicle identification and for vehicle location, must be installed over the model railway layout. And, depending on the size of the layout, at least three satellites are required for fully automatic operation. Furthermore, it is a disadvantage, all the vehicles have a black radio and satellite sensor integrated on their roof, which does not look really nice. There are other car systems, like the DC-Car system (Germany) or the MCC ModelCarParts system (Netherlands), which appear to be more advantageous for true model building. Nevertheless, such a car system makes a lot of fun. More information and a lot of photos are available at http://www.pilentum.de, for free.