MiniDCC Station

Years ago I purchased a MiniDCC station for use with my N gauge railway. The unit is a small compact PCB that uses an LMD18200 H-Bridge device to power the tracks. These devices are now getting very expensive to buy, and are hard to come by.
I’ve stayed in contact with the developer over the years and suggested to him that the project could do with updating to use a newer device that is cheaper and more readily available. We came up with the L6203.
After weeks of testing I finally had a working device, so it was a few days solid to produce the PCB which had options to mount all the controls and display on it, or / and have header pins so it could still be used with off board components such as the screen and switches. The board was uploaded to JLCPCB for production.
This video shows the building and testing of the board. Don’t worry I don’t document every component....
Sadly the developer is no longer offering the original MiniDCC boards for sale, which I feel is a shame as in my opinion there is still a market for it. It still has that unique selling point of directly controlling 4 locos at one time without the need to select each one as is the case with traditional DCC stations.

[@willp7802]

Nice looking board there.
Interested to know what the " newer H bridge device " was over the specifed LMD18200 which are so expensive , no mention on the Mini DCC site ?

[@MalcolmCrabbe]

Thank you. The H bridge used in this board was the L6203. It's Max 5A rating, so more than adequate for the task. Not as cheap as the L298N dual H bridges, but then they are rated at around 1.5A a channel, and half the price of the original 18200 used in the MinDCC project.
There is no mention of this on the MiniDCC website as it's not an official board that Robert designed or approved of. I just wanted to board that had everything connected rather than having cables running everywhere, and this was the final result. Whilst this wasn't an "official" project, he was however very helpful in writing a custom version of the firmware for my needs, which he said he would make available through the firmware updater application.

[@willp7802]

@@MalcolmCrabbeThankyou for that info.
We had been looking at the DCC-EX Arduino controllers but they all use mobiles or pc control, we just wanted a couple of simple rotary controls.
Came across your minidcc by chance when searching for the DCCs and now having looking at the Minidcc site a little confused, could you spare a moment to enlighten us please.
The main page says V3 now available but nothing more about it ? Is V3 more to do with the Firmware updater rather than the main DCC controller ?
The site allows you to Download the hex files to program the Pic1938 but then you mention the Firmware uploads he sent you ? assume that need one of those extra boards to program in the data ? Those extra boards mention a pre programmed Pic 1455, yet their store is closed ?
Sounds like the pic1455 is acting as a programmer which seems odd if you have to have a programmer to program the pic1938 ?
Still might just be us, not very clever with all this micro circuity 😄