I bought several CANSOLs from MERG for powering the solenoids but unfortunately the first one I built had problem with one of PICs. I suspect I have a probably put in something else wrong but it ran hot and probably melted something, Voltage regulator was also very hot. Built a second CANSOL yesterday afternoon and today I tested it. This one ran cold but for quite a while it refused to go into FLIM. I eventually found the problem that one of the PICs wasn't quite seated in its slot, this done the GIZMO started flashing a green light meaning that the microprocessor was working perfectly fine. So I hooked it back up to the test rig and it went straight into FLIM on pressing the button. Wired up the solenoids and programmed it and its all working. Mission Accomplished! Its quite an achievement to have got this far having had no prior experience of electronics. I even set up one event to run both my test solenoid points in sequence which is probably going to be occurring quite a bit as a lot of my points are likely to be in pairs for loops or catchpoints etc

So back to the main layout and the re-wiring project.