Brio - Servo controlled switch - M1 track

Controlled switches are cool, but I wanted to take it a step further and add a remote control to them.

First step is to select motors to control the switch. I chose sg90 9g servos (180 degree variant, you need to control the position). 

As a base for the switch I used the model this is remixed from, where a hole to mount the servo was cut instead of the control knob.  Not as good looking as the original, but not too bad and can be prettified later. The gears remain the same. In the prototype i just hotglued the small gear to servo, and will have to design a proper mount later.

Then you need a controller for the servos - Arduino UNO clone and cheap buttons from aliexpress work nicely. 

After that you need to program the board to control individual servos with buttons. With AI this is not hard at all even if you know only basic programming. I have the servo at position 0 to go straight and 120 degrees to switch the track to the right. Pressing the button moves it to the other position.

Finally you wire it together and enjoy pressing buttons.

Please be aware that this is still work in progress. Feel free to contribute to this if you'd also like to remote control your train switches.

Next steps in this small project:

1. Design proper mount of the small gear to the servo
2. Figure out a way to make the switch controllable even without the servo so it can also be used as a manual switch
3. Design housing for arduino and power source
4. Design housing for multiple control buttons (up to 6 with the UNO board)
5. Polish the source code and add it here.
6. ???
7. Have my kid grow up a bit so he enjoys controlling trains more then destrying the tracks I built :).

Thanks to the @cgillstrap_121944 for the cool design of the switch.