Welcome to the Cumbria & Scottish Borders Area Group Forum

 Most of the Metcalfe kits are designed as straight or square structures, so if you need to make a building for a strangely shaped area then you need to be prepared for a little bit of additional work. For those familiar with making Metcalfe kits ( other suppliers are available) and those contemplating doing so for the first time, there are a couple of Golden rules. Rule 1 . Read the instructions carefully Rule 2. Don't throw anything away (even on completion) there tends to be additional bits of thick card ideal for bracing buildings and spare sheets of stone, tiles and brick paper. Get yourself a bits box and hold on to them. For this article I am building an N scale Railway bridge (PN146/7) with the additional problem of it crossing a curved double track as you can see above.  Ignore the trains underneath in the holding area. That will be hidden before final installation. I initially built the thick card bridge former ( square structure) and set it aside to dry. Testing on the c

 With groups in our area having smaller attendees at Zoom meetings, we decided to try a multi group session so that our speakers would benefit from a fuller audience. On Sunday 14th January The Scottish Border Group, Cumbria Group and North Wales Group joined together for our first joint session. This worked very well, with our speaker, David Roberts giving an excellent talk on Arduino hardware delivered to around 24 members. For those who missed it, it is available on the MERG website on Channel 36 of MERG TV Some Arduino software tutorials are available on the MERG website and there is an Arduino Special Interest Group for those interested. If you want a well structured, beginners course for absolute beginners, I would suggest Paul McWhorter as a starting point.

 Davy Dick's  PMP 5 Logic probe is a really useful piece of testing gear to establish the logic output of a 5 Volt circuit.  The original kit is built on stripboard and requires three tracks to be cut which can be problematic for some. It may be useful, particularly at exhibitions, to show the status of a digital signal being output from one PMP Kit to ascertain how the next circuit should respond.  A good example of this would be PMP4a (Shuttle Add on) driving PMP 18 (Ezy-Points). To avoid any confusion of polarity, I arranged for the Power and Logic headers to be made available at both ends of the circuit and colour coded them as follows. Red  + 5Volts  ;   Black 0 Volts common ground  ; White  - Logical Output to be tested All the tracks in my version are continuous and will fit on the same board provided in the kit. Obviously, the component layout have been changed slightly but still follows the original circuit diagram. A common stripboard size is 25 pin x 9 pin which is perfe

 An excellent presentation by Dr. Craig Lennox on workshop safety at today's West of Scotland area group meeting. An amusing but nevertheless serious video was followed by a detailed talk on safety and first aid. I am hoping this talk will be made available on the WOSAG website in due course. The take home message is to ensure your workspace is well ventilated, tidy with no trailing cables. Plan what you are going to do using appropriate tools, avoid distractions and don't rush A clear head is essential. Use PPE where necessary for example ear protection, safety glasses and laser glasses. The risks of burns, cuts, electrical shock and inhalation of dust and fumes were all covered in some detail. Automatic External Defibrillator (AED) are now installed in most supermarkets. A short video was shown illustrating just how easy they are to be used. Excellent talk.  Keep safe everyone.

 Following on from the station lights blog I published awhile ago I have now have the lights coming on automatic when a train comes into any of the four tracks using a Arduino Nano As I have some spare Ezybus boards I used one of these to do all my connections to the Nano, it also has a 12 Volt input to power the Nano As my layout is DCC I am using a MERG PMP7 for train detecting, which uses a opto-isolator, to control the LED on the control panel. One side has a voltage on, in my case 5 Volts with a dropper resistor which brings it down to about 3.5 Volts, the other side is connected to ground 0 Volts. One of the Nano pins reads this voltage, if it is 3.5 volts it does nothing but if it at 0 volts it switches on another pin on the Nano. I have used 4 PMP7's for the 4 tracks and used 4 pins on the Nano ( one for each track ) if any of the pins goes to 0 Volts it will switch on the output pin, this in turn switches on a replay to power the LED's ( I have not used the output pin

 A few months ago I produced a batch of Ezypoint kits for our local members to overcome a shortage in the Kitlocker.  At that time the kit was produced on stripboard which some members find problematic. An additional PCB board normally available from MERG was not available either.  Alan Turner ( the PCB designer) had only a few boards available but graciously provided me with the gerber files to allow me to order PCBs directly from China . Having sourced all necessary components, the kits were duly made up. I find this simple kit is really useful for automation projects. A toggle switch provides either a HIGH or LOW on the PIC input pin to determine which of the two servo positions is selected. For a particular application, I wanted to use a push button to toggle the position on alternate presses of the button. This involved a rewrite of some of the code in the PIC. I initially developed the program using an Arduino as a means of testing the logic. When this was successfully working, I