Entry posted by craigwelsh
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A few people have asked about the wiring on this layout and hopefully the following pictures will help a little. In time i'll try and do proper diagrams but hopefully these will help people out. Zoom in on the images for clearer views.
On view in this shot are the following types of dropper.
Pink - Goods Loop outer
Red/Purple - Goods Loop inner
Grey - UP Main outer
Red/Yellow - UP Main inner
Black - Down Main outer
Red/black - Down Main inner
The code makes it easy to flip the board and attach the correct droppers to the correct copper sub bus. We use sub buses both for fault finding and for potential occupancy detection.
You always have solid colour for the outer rail and these always connect to the higher bus line of copper too (the pairs of buses are vertically stacked for each line under the board). From another board so no goods loop but the shot below shows the UP and DOWN line sub buses along with the main DCC around the layout using the blue and brown mains cable. We've confused things by having two power districts so two main DCC buses as well as the sub buses! The inter board connector also has two pins used for every DCC wire too, CBUS and 12v DC have yet to be wired up to this connector.
In this next shot we've got some more wires and a MERG CBUS point control module.
Green - Frog wires with numbers attached. Here we have two wires from point 12 to join up and wire correctly.
Twisted Pair Blue and Yellow - MERG CBUS control bus, goes all the way around the layout controlling all signals, points, controllers and potentially block occupancy, electromagnets too.
Twisted Pair Red and Black - 12v DC power that goes to all of the MERG CBUS boards
Yellow - Tortoise control, numbers as per the frog, there go from the turnout to the MERG CBUS module which can control 4 of them. We can easily flip the wires if the motor goes the wrong way or indeed flip the output in software.
Here are 3 of the recently installed fiddleyard points on the new trackwork in this area. This trackwork replaced some which had very tight radii (we now have a 3' 6" minimum). Above baseboard where possible for ease of access, the frog wiring also is pretty obvious!
Once all the remaining track and motors are in I intend on painting the board surface all black to make it look a bit more presentable and hide the traces of old removed track!
An overview of the complete point installation. The Tortoise have sub bases for quick change if needed and are fitted with ribbon cable and 9-pin serial for the same reason.
Close up on an installation showing the serial connection with two control wires (Yellow), frog wire (Green though not numbered yet) and the correct dropper colours for this circuit (Red/Yellow and Grey). In the background another motor needs installing which will have Red/Black and Black feeds.
Due to our Tortoise having the earlier revision boards inside more substantial switches have been retrofitted to deal with frog switching as shown.
Any queries or questions do please comment!
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