eldavo

Afternoon All, Mixed sort of day on the weather front in these parts. Dog walked and garden chores done so may have enough brownie points to allow me to go to the Fawley Hill bash tomorrow. Apparently I'm supposed to be demonstrating some kind of railway modelling stuff in the museum. Not sure what. Hope this bloomin' cough I've been stuck with for days clears up soon, getting to be a right pain now. Have a good one, what's left of it. Cheers Dave

Get away. I can't believe your bosses haven't noticed you went into semi-retirement several years ago! Have a good one all. Cheers Dave P.S. Gordon's legendary golf banditry didn't save us from defeat on Tuesday against GMR and his mate.

No surprises but for me the Peco 55 doesn't cut the mustard however you ballast it. The finer code 40 rail section looks so much better. Why compromise unless you are in a rush. Cheers Dave

I know which I would prefer... Have a good one all. Cheers Dave

Not just Sundays. I seem to remember going to Wales on a Tuesday and it was closed! Cheers Dave

The road surfaces and markings are all Scalescenes printouts cut about and stuck down with Pritt stick. Joins are disguised with weathering powders. Cheers Dave

Thanks for the comments chaps. Yup, Waton survived the Epsom show, just. Amazingly the thing that didn't give problems was the new 4 diamond flat crossing. We had very few derailments or other problems due to it. There are a couple of bumps that need smoothing out but it's close. The Conrad point motors continue to be a source of problems. They randomly decide they are tired and stop throwing reliably for half an hour then start working again! Very frustrating. I guess you get what you pay for and maybe it's time to replace them. One or two items of stock were consigned to the "naughty stock box" and will be dealt with but generally the trains kept running despite the efforts of the operators. Generally we had a laugh and interesting conversations with a number of folks. Lots of things to do to improve the trainset before it's next outing. Cheers Dave

I may be wrong but possibly some of the big hoppers use the res pipe to feed pneumatic discharge door mechanisms. Cheers Dave

Morning All, Hope Gordon doesn't pick up too many tips from playing with low handicappers. He's a bandit already! Today is "Pack Waton up for the Epsom and Ewell show" day. It nearly all works! Hopefully a pleasant weekend playing trains in store. Any one passing say hello to me and me old mucker PhilH. Have a good one all. Cheers Dave

Would that be the one that goes knee naw nah, nor knee nor nah nor knee, nor knee nor nah nor knee nor nah? Cheers Dave (who can't type whistling)

Morning All, Glad to hear the docs are getting to the root of the problem Gordon. No beer! Can you drink cider? Have a good one all. Cheer Dave

I'll admit I had thought of that approach Stu but as ever over-confidence led me to the "how hard can it be" 4 crossing approach. Of course I may end up ripping it up and redoing it yet! Cheers Dave

Good thinking. As a code hacker rather than an electrickery expert I hadn't thought of that. Time to go down to the shed and experiment... Cheers Dave

Spot on Nigel. I set the address + 4 in my Multimaus and all works just fine. Hadn't realised this oddity of the Roco system. Might be able to accomodate it in the decoder software with a bit of research. As to cost. An Arduino Nano can be had for about £8 to £10 and the only extra required is an optoisolator, a diode and 3 resistors. Total cost is probably about £12 or less. This should control 6 servos and/or several Tortoise motors. Sounds a reasonable price given that it includes the DCC accessory decoder function and built-in servo calibration capability. I haven't found a cheaper option but then again I haven't looked very far. Cheers Dave

You know how it happens, you start looking at one problem and you end up solving another. I was looking at ways to maximise the utilisation of the power generated by my solar panels by controlling the distribution of the power in my house using a microcontroller and some bits. This led me to the Arduino family of microcontroller boards. These boards are reasonably cheap, quite capable and dead easy to programming as there is a ton of free bits of software available. I still haven't sorted out my household power control (yet) but I've learned a lot about the technology and started to look for other things to do with it. My local model railway club, Winchester Railway Modellers, is currently building a new exhibition layout, Redbridge Wharf. More details here: http://www.rmweb.co.uk/community/index.php?/topic/58444-wrm-redbridge-wharf/ The fiddleyard for this layout has over 40 turnouts which would break the bank if we used Tortoise motors. We need something cheaper but don't fancy subjecting our handmade track to the thumping of solenoids. Servos seem like a good idea. We would also like to be able to operate the layout using conventional DC switching or DCC magic. We need a servo controller and DCC accessory decoder that is cheap(ish). This is where the Arduino comes in. The Arduino can control a number of servos using a single wire to each. Each servo is connected to 0 volts, +5 volts and one of the PWM outputs of the Arduino. Using a PWM output is native to the microcontroller and requires no extra circuitry. The 0 and 5 volt lines are taken from an external power supply, probably one salvaged from an old PC. What I have done is to hook up a couple of servos in this manner plus a couple of toggle switches. Again the Arduino can easily detect switch input, just switch one of the digital inputs to 0 volts. The toggle switch is used to detect whether the servo should be thrown to the left or right. That's DC control sorted then. You need to be able to calibrate the throw for the servos really so another pushbutton switch has been added. Pushing this starts a calibration sequence on the last servo switched. One push and the servo centres, push again and the servo starts slowly stepping right, push again and the limit of throw is set and the servo returns to centre then starts slowly stepping in the other direction. Push the button once more and the other extreme throw is set and we are done. So thats's DC control and calibration sorted what about DCC? Luckily some folks have thought of this before and come up with a solution (or two). A bit of external circuitry is added using an optoisolator (to prevent the white smoke escaping from the Arduino) providing a connection to the controller. The Arduino detects the pulses of the DCC signal and interprets them as individual message packets. Just need to look for the accessory messages and activate the relavent servos. Easy peasy. Here's a pic of my breadboarded test set up. It 'ain't pretty but it works. The white box on the right is a cheapo 12v power supply as used in LED lighting rigs. It's feeding the Arduino. If a DCC signal is detected the toggle switches are ignored so the one lash up works happily as a servo controller with or without DCC controller. I've tested it with my Sprog and also a friend's ZTC 511 and all seems OK. Currently it doesn't work with my Roco Multimaus so there is some debugging to do. There is also an embryonic command line interface which allows commands to be entered from a PC connected to the USB interface so I think it would be fairly simple to set up a scheme whereby the settings could be extracted from a board and reloaded. Quite useful if you need to replace a faulty board quickly. I haven't yet got it controlling a Tortoise motor which would be cool as we have some of those to control on the scenic part of the layout. I'm sure it can be done with a bit of fiddling. There's also a lot of cleaning up needed in the code. All good fun. Cheers Dave

Not yet!

Surprise surprise when I came to test the crossing complex there was a short! Not at all surprised I have to say. It took me a day or two of head scratching before I spotted it but I found it eventually. Having ripped up all the old track there was nothing for it but to stick the new crossing down and sort out the approach tracks. All four approaches and four exits have now been laid and wired in. Not a pretty sight. Amazing how much internal wiring was hidden on those Atlas crossings. There are also a bunch of wires in place as I don't want to rely on fishplates for electrical continuity. The radii are better than they were but not quite as large as I would have liked. A couple of multiple units, a Farrish 170 and a Dapol Voyager, that wouldn't negotiate the old curves will manage these so they are probably good enough. There are still no check rails on most of the crossing but things seem to run reasonably well. More fettling to do then the acid test, will the full HST rake propel through it at a scale 90mph. Cheers Dave

Morning All, There appears to be a bright orb in the sky though it's bloomin' cold. I'm sure it will be back to cloudy by the time I reach the golf course. A rare quiet moment... The frustrated (in more ways than one) terrier is asleep! He is less than happy at having to wear the "lampshade of shame" but as he chewed his stitches out after having his bits removed... Two more days to go then it can come off. I don't know about maudlin but 10 minutes of Leonard Cohen is enough to make anyone slash their wrists! Have good one all. Cheers Dave

Sounds like a plan. The gauge change is so small accommodating it within the point work is realy not a problem (IMHO). Cheers Dave

I'm late to the party on this thread! Very tidy looking plan, should give you plenty of scope for artistry. The 47 is tempting me to spend more money though it would need to be in Colas or some such livery for Waton. If you are planning on building your own track with 2mm society code 40 rail I'm sure you won't be disappointed. Look forward to following your progress. Cheers Dave

Archie was an Alsation and a Meerkat in previous incarnations! Quite amazing what a skilled surgeon can do with some bits of titanium and a few screws. Broken legs, nah. Have a good one all. Cheers Dave

Must be the Aston Martin grill that does it. Certainly looks a tidy little motor. Seems the normal seasonal grey in these parts. No doubt it will rain when I set foot on the golf course this afternoon. Should be doing some baseboard modifications but the staff seem to have other ideas! Day out for some culture (beer) tomorrow and Ally Pally on Saturday so good things in prospect. Have a good one all. Cheers Dave

The wrecking crew have been at it so there is no going back... There was definitely something I was going to do before lifting the existing track. What was it? Oh yes, test the crossings. Oops. Cheers Dave

We have one of those pipes in our house! I'm expecting a delivery of a telescopic sight today to replace the one that broke when the rifle hit the floor yesterday afternoon. When I have that the incidence of lead poisoning in rodents in the Winchester area will increase substantially. In other news, I'm now on tablets. Well at least one Android per day. Future posts can be expected to have all manner of strange word combinations while I attempt to master voice dictation technology. Having worked with speech technology for umpteen years it's strange now to see it actually works (mostly). Have a good day All. Cheers Dave not typing this by dictation technology on this machine google maps get it right pagination seems to be sadly lacking is it. That should have been, "Not entirely convinced by the dictation technology on this machine, it nearly gets it right but is sadly lacking in punctuation."

Those of a nervous disposition or an engineering bent might want to look away at this point. A bunch of code 55 rail has been soldered into positions similar to those on the template. A couple of wagons seem to run OK(ish) through the complex and there don't seem to be any short circuits. It might just work (with quite a bit of tweaking). There are as yet no check rails so I need to do some work with plasticard to rectify that. The 2mm association copperclad sleepers are pretty flimsy and the insulated frogs are pretty tiny so to reinforce things I've squidged 5 minute epoxy around the place. With this done the whole lot has had a bath to neutralise the flux and soak the sleepers off the paper template. Next up will be a bit of cleaning up then electrical bodgery and some testing. If things actually run across this lot then it will be time to modify the baseboard and look at installing it. Cheers Dave