A big pause on all model railway projects for several months due to 'life'. Actually I only managed to build 1 model over 3 months!

But in February I tried to remember where I had got to with the control panel. Back in October I managed to get the switches working and figured out how I was supposed to wire it all up. Essentially its a matrix on a grid where there are 12 switches but 4 switches switch on the other 8. So 4 switches are in on / off mode and the 8 are in on/off/on mode with one of the 'ons' unpowered. The throw reverts back to the off central position. I used these switches since I have surplus of them rather than using push buttons. I have 32 switches altogether and about 14 are working something. 

Back then I couldn't get the LEDs working so I parked it and then model railway life had its pause.

In February coming back to the model railway I tried a different sort of LED, played around with the programming and it switched on under test. So this was good news and I started working out how I was going distribute them. I have a stripboard distribution board over the IDC board which eliminates the use of larger terminal blocks and then an LED bank underneath. However I have found with the first one that splitting them into a bank of 4 LEDs per stripboard might be easier.

Currently have a problem / glitch not sure what it is but is something to do with this part of the panel and basically affects the data input so currently the layout is setup on the TM7 board temporally while I figure out what I have 'broken'.

Sometimes I look at how many wires and I think have I made this too complicated. Then I look at the old panel which was the same size and only supported 9 points and massive bundle of wiring and I think its not too bad!