Jon Gridley

Thank you Geoff, yea I get that’s pretty annoying, wouldn’t be as bad if you could get hold of the nozzles

What did you used for the diagonal stripe?

Good Evening, i am wanting to use this code, i have replaced my adafruit shield with a 'all in one' shield with the dcc decoder built in. it has a A4988 driver installed. Can Anyone advise how i can modify the code to work with the A4988 driver rather than the adafruit sheild, i realise the servo stuff will need to be changed but i can do that, i'm just struggling to get my head around the stepper side of the coding as the attached code uses both the adafruit and accelstepper libaries. my stepper is currently setup as AccelStepper stepper1(1, 5, 4); on the example code from dccinterfaces. i'm running a 5:1 reduction from the stepper. (16t to 80t)

I'm currently re-working my turntable from been mounted on top of the stepper to having a belt drive located under the table. It's made of 10mm aluminium its not the neatest but its my first every attempt at using my micro mill. There are three top hat bearings in the assembly two back to back on the main plate and a third in the support under the main gear. I'm using a 4:1 ratio. Should allow for some lovely fine indexing

Any update on this Ian? I’d be really interested. on a side note has anyone worked on a sketch to be able to program the roads into the eeprom memory via a keypad?

I love the Lima 09s, I’ve about 8 of them, although one is wearing a Hornby body as the Lima chassis is nice than the steam loco chassis Hornby used with the odd wheel set spacing. I don’t think I paid more than about £12 for any of them, I’ve attached a photo of my 13 but made with Lima 09s, I’m going to be running auto decoupling via a decoder in the master and sound with a speaker in each from the slave. They were both driven but I found you get some hunting so the slave now is just weighted but not driven. She’s also running a CD player motor and has a lovely slow crawl

I saw somewhere not sure if it was this post or another several asked about the EE 6KT, i have some drawings that may be of use?

Wow thank you guys, love the pic of the 09? With the body removed. I'll have a look and those links and the book, for me it's just a fun little project to really get to grips with 3d modeling so far I've stuck to simple things like mounts for ipad on my drone controller, and speaker boxes for dcc.

I'm trying to hunt down any profile style drawings of a 6kt, even side on, front on photos would be of help. i'm planning to model one in cad to 3d print, once done the plan is to put on thingiverse so that it is there for all to use/print I have several 08's and 09's plus a 13 so thought a 6KT would be a fitting addition Jon

That's would be awesome ray

Ray where did you source the belt drive from?, i had a look at your other thread, i like that the shaft is then supported above and below the large gear

Wow that looks nice Ian, are you planning to sell kits for the touchscreen?, will it be able to store locations? i got my turntable working on my test board, (scratch built with a copper clad board with bits of Dapol kit) using one of the earlier sketches can't think which atm. i really do need to get back on it hence checking the updates on thread. i got around power by making a 360 degree ring with two contacts (one for each rail) then in the code one of the arduino pins flips depending on if the table is at head or tail (depending on output polarity) at the moment this is an additional line on each position/road in the code in turn this pin is switching a dpdt relay flipping the polarity to make sure its correct, this happend so quick the sound locos don't seem to notice the other mod i had was to use the servo output in a previous sketch to move a micor servo to position a small rubber against my contact ring just to prevent drift when the motor was off, i#m going to be building up another tt soon, so defo going to get one of your kits ian, might actually get two and swap out all the boards on my first, its a much tidier solution. Jon

https://hackaday.io/project/11224-mechaduino thought this may be of interest?, it allows very accurate posistioning along with constant posistion checking effectively turning out stepper motors into 360 degree servos reading the various wlak throughs it uses a magnet on the end of the stepper shaft and a magnetic rotarty encoder on the board, the calibration routine producting 16,384 entries for posisioning!

I'm just wondering has anyone tried setting this style of turntable up with rocrail? I've got mine working nicely just want to get it setup in software now.

i think the whine is inherent of the stepper motors, the rev 17 software powers down the stepper after it has rotated, it also has a provision for a servo brake which i intend to use, i'm just going to make a foot shape on a bit of rod to push against the opposite side of my contact plate to act as a brake. on a separate note, i'd have a good play and using a relay controlled by the Arduino works perfectly started building up the rest of the bridge now

I have the libraries stored on my dropbox, i did find i have to alter the the name of the stepper driver library. here is the link. https://www.dropbox.com/sh/o15rm6xz8iqp1uv/AADNfGefgdrStUCukmjWqVgJa?dl=0 I have also had a good play about, at the moment i have hacked the merg reverse loop module to allow me to controll the relay remotely, just to check all works, then i'll mount my relay and a control transistor on to a bit of strip board. i have added the following code to the bottom of the 'steppertimer' routine. line 420 this is using Rev 17 of the code by Luce001 in post #155 don't forget to add 'pinMode(8, OUTPUT) in the setup routine. //New section to read direction bed is facing and invert the polarity if needed. //pinMode(8, OUTPUT) also added to void setup() if (tableTargetHead) { //use head location variable { digitalWrite(8, HIGH); Serial.println(" DCC Polarity Relay activated "); } } else { //use tail location variable { digitalWrite(8, LOW); Serial.println(" DCC Polarity Relay deactivated "); } }

have you tried the sensor the other way up, when i was playing with mine i found it only works around one way, i removed the outer plastic and heat shrunk it to make it smaller. in regards to the reversing module although simple in installation I'm building to a budget and can't justify buying a £90 reversing module when a DPDT relay costs less then £5, i'm sure its a easy mod in the software but not 100% sure how, it means then it will seemlessly flip the track polarity as the bridge rotates

yes DCC, no break in the contacts, i've popped the bridge off and taken a couple shots, it does it ramdomly, think the reverse module is too sensitive, it'll even to it whilst rotating with a loco on. i plan to use a simple double pole double throw relay, i allready have the relay and the hardware side is easy, i just need to know how to modify the code to switch the relay when the bridge is 180 degrees out. Jon

Good evening all. I'm new to the forum having stumbled across it whilst searching how to build a dcc turntable. I studied electrical enginnering at college many years ago although now only used a hobby, i'm learning arduinos but keep getting distracted by projects. i'm also new to model rail, and am building a layout along with my dad, brother and uncle, at this stage i'm mocking up the turntable on a board for testing, i have followed through the first few pages (thank you so much for the easy to follow guide) and i'm now up to rev 17. i have the screen but have yet to connect it. the turntable is based on a Dapol kit as its a style similar to the local area (west somerset railway) although the deck is now made from copper clad board with brass I beam to add support and height in the middle, attached to which is a mecano bush wheel drilled out to clamp directly to my stepper motor which has bearings much the same as i was planning to use. under the bush wheel is a simple two track contact disk made from copper clad (35mm hole saw to seperate tracks (only through copper) and 52mm to cut out the disk. contacts is made via wipers with rolled ends made from normal pickup type strip. now i've tried using a reversing loop module (merg type) but it keeps tripping, it i connect directly sound loco works fine for 360degrees plus without tripping the controller. I also plan to use a servo brake and build a control box with a rotating switch and resister ladder rather then a pot. I post up photos of the underside of the bridge when i next take it off. also have a nice idea for wooden decking that should look very realistic what i would like to do is be able to toggle a output to switch a relay to invert the track polarity depending on the direction of the table. could someone please point me in the right direction of how to add this (code wise, hardware i'm fine with) Jon