Bluerail battery installation in Chattanooga

[rperego]

I just installed a Bluerail board in a Chattanooga, putting all the parts in the tender.
The Bluerail board is somewhat limited in the amp draw, but it works fine in a big hauler.  Pulling the tender and 4 passenger cars, on a 5' diameter circle, on the flat, I measured .36 amps at 1/2 speed, and .5 amps at WOT, which is well below the bluerail max amps.  This is using a 1300 mah 3 cell LIPO.  Have yet to try on an incline nor the bluetooth range.

For low voltage cutoff I made a small board which utilizes a relay which cuts out if the voltage drops below 9.6 volts.  I also put in a 2 amp fuse although the Bluerail board has overdraw protection up to a limit.

For sound I put a small Bluetooth speaker in the tender along with the LVC board, Bluerail board, and battery.  I found where some folks have robbed the BT receiver part out of a cheap BT speaker so as to use the existing tender speaker and also replaced the BT speaker battery with a voltage regulator so it is powered off the main battery.  The bluerail app includes a way to sync the chuffing sound, which with some fiddling works fairly well. 

If anyone is interested in how to make the LVC protection, I can send a schematic of the circuit although it is dirt simple.   I use a momentary "start"  button to initially trigger the relay, and then it is held with the battery power going through an appropriately sized resister such that when the input voltage drops below 9.6 (or whatever is desired for a cut off) the voltage drop from the resister puts the voltage below the minimum hold voltage for the relay being used.  I also power the "drop" circuit through the relay contacts so when it reaches LVC the hold circuit is also disabled.  Hence there is no draw at all if accidentally leaving a connected battery in the train.

I charge outside of the train.

I'm not pushing this compared to the RC solutions - just wanted to experiment with the Bluerail board and other than a potential range issue, it looks like a nice solution.