So recently I haven't been up much in the loft, household jobsare keeping me downstairs, however last night I had a couple of short sessions. A few days ago my Cbus test rig had completely failed and I did some head scratching to work out what had gone wrong with it. I was using my gizmo test unit and it was flashing orange lights and the penny dropped when I removed it from the system and did a test of the tester and found that it was faulty. Not exactly useful. So I have now added in resistor at the end of the data network (the gizmo had been performing that task) and suddenly the rest of the system all burst back into life. Lights and all. (although my CANAC8C still isn't functioning correctly)

So I decided to look at the next thing, only a small thing but it had puzzled me for a few weeks. How to attach a lighting unit to the CANACC8. Its had experimenter unit attached to it but I had soldered the terminal blocks to it but I didn't know which ports were the outputs and which ones were the inputs. A bit of testing with a grain of wheat bulb followed and I have now figured up that one of the ends is the input and all the rest are the output (or it might be the other way round.) Now wired up and working alongside the experimenter board. So this is really good news but when I wire it all up to the layout I am going to need a daisy chain terminal block to power up the single input / output as I won't want to be stuffing 8 return wires into one port on the board! At present I have 5 individual lights but might add some yard lighting and other features and have a series of lights running in parallel of one switch from the canpan

I started attaching the boards to little pieces of plywood which have a command strip on the back of them the idea being that if I have to remove them from the main layout (for testing) I can easily get them off. Command strips are a little bit more secure than velcro and even though these will be secured by wiring I would rather they didn't fall off.

Im still operating on the one main base board (with a 2nd short 800mm board at one end) but hopefully will be adding one side to the layout and then start the other side so the layout hopefully by Christmas will be U shaped and I can get going on the TMD

Locomotive detailing is paused for the moment, i need some footplate crew for my 1F. I finally added some detail parts to this loco with the lamps front and back set for yard

I have a Class 33 that I intend to start detailing at some point (subject to part availabilty) as a practice model as not done much detailing before.