I don’t know where to put this?

I don't know yet if I have stumbled on to something that might have an application for us.

I have just learned about these controllers for model trains. Does anyone know more about these?

Apparently, you send one constant voltage down the track along with a signal from the controller, and you can control the speed and direction of a number of motors (locomotives) through some kind of input. I think the voltage is 18 volts.

Question is: Can it control other voltages and amperes to control more than one motor? I believe it would be an easy task to operate a simply relay (on-off) to control a number of different projectors for example that are diffent voltages than 18v.

I am anxious to find out more as this might be a solution to eliminate extra slip rings that now require one for each circuit.

I've not heard of it.

I've seen things called multiplexing, where you can run many information circuits on one wire as long as you have two different sync crystals at either end.

There are the plug in modules that I've seen at radio shack that send digital code signals to turn lights on and off in other rooms. They may have a way of changing the voltage output at the controlled circuit as long as the receiver has that capability.

It would be interesting to look into the train thing. I'm guessing that is works very much like the radio shack device.

A shear guess is that the decoding module in the locomotive is able to transform the voltage from 18 volts to lower, to slow down or stop the motor. Apparently you can also control lights on the train, etc., as well.

So, if this is how it works, one would need some kind of "in-between" unit (relay or something) to make the controlled signal operate say a 110 v. DC motor. Less complex would be to operate a number of auxiliary projectors mounted on the projectors.

I think it is something definitely to explore.

Perhaps when the module receives a series of pulses it steps a relay which add different amounts or resistance to the circuit thus lowering the voltage and slowing the train in steps.

It is fairly simple to run two separate ac bulbs off of one slip ring by just running through two diodes placed in opposite directions. You would need to supply twice the required ac voltage to the system as each diode would clip half the ac wave and thus half the voltage. But then with a variable rheostat in each circuit, you could have two independently controlled lamps on each slip-ring.