I bought a set as a Christmas gift for my pre-school daughter. Good first impression, works fine, the app seems quite good (but the train is usable without it), the color "programming" works nicely and is quite funny to watch a train going on its own, stopping on stops, reversing track, etc. I'd like to have a slower speed (the train offers three speeds but even the slowest one is quite fast, IMHO), though. (And the guide states the train detects derailing and stops automatically, which it doesn't in our experience, it just goes on on the floor...)
Now, I'm thinking about reverse-engineering the BT communication and building my own app... :-)
I actually wanted to do this myself too. I'm quite sure there is a firmware that can be expanded not very dissimilar from an arduino.
The other thing that I'd love to do is to 3d print a station (with related time stop) with a Qi charger. Shouldn't be too hard to have an induction coil under the train. The only problem is that the firmware shut down the train when it is charging.
I have found there is a Scratch extension using Scratch Link to communicate with the train (see https://scratch.intelino.com) , and I guess it should be easier to reverse-engineer that, I guess.
My toddler loved this until we lost the train. Interoperability with common wood train rails is good except that the locomotive doesn’t have enough traction to go up any of the ascender pieces we have. Creative use of switches can reserve those for the other trains while the “Shinkansen” stays on flat track.
The one feature this has that I am missing in the Duplo set is the ability to choose if the train should go left or right with the "snaps"/programming. The quality look much worse than the Duplo set though. Also really missing USB rechargeable batteries.
This is a clever idea. I assume part of the original idea here was "What if we could have the programming trains with signalling from Factorio and OpenTTD, but in the real world?"
It does sound pretty fun to have some kind of real world Factorio train network game...
One of the 'tutorial game' is indeed to move resources. I think a lot can be done if the train exposes variable and counters (ie.: the colour blocks become resources, the train starts counting them, and you can write if-then-else logic around it)
There is a Scratch extension using Scratch Link to communicate with the train, so you can definitely build a program using counters and variables. See https://scratch.intelino.com/
