Skip to main content

WOSAG Meeting 25th October

 Yet another well attended meeting of the West of Scotland Group with 34 members attending including Greg from Australia.

Davy Dick showed us some work he had been doing on improving the basic Track Circuit Voltage detector (PMP 1). A commercial offering shown below has recently been reduced to just under £13 pounds.



The theory behind how these work was explained and various potential methods outlined including rectification for DCC users. Keith Shovelin also demonstrated a DCC version that included a voltage display which would be ideal for fault finding on a layout. These solutions are all substantially cheaper.

George showed us his new Diorama of a street scene with flashing road cones using pre-wired  MicroLitz leds with  a welder repairing pipes using basic PMP kits and some 3D printing.

Davy then discussed progress on the carriage lighting project using the much smaller SMD ITR8307 instead of the TCRT5000.  He demonstrated the voltage change using a flag attached to some points. With these changes it may be possible to fit coach lighting into N gauge stock, as well as under point and turntable position detection.

A second edition of Davy's Electronics for beginners is being planned.

More details later.


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Train sequence / timetable using Arduino

                              Following discussions in a MERG Zoom meeting about potential projects for the Cumbria virtual area group I have started this blog to share my ideas for building a train sequence / timetable system based on an Arduino UNO. The trigger for this project was Andy Robb's article in the MERG journal (June 2020 edition). In it Andy describes using an UNO with a OLED display to produce an electronic station display board.  Having tried out Andy's version I started thinking about expanding the idea and have come up the following list of possibilities: 1. Replace my card index train sequence with an electronic version. 2. Have the train sequence synchronised with the on platform displays. 3. Display an analogue clock on the station display and have it display the train times. 4. Store the position reached in the sequence so that it starts where it left off on power up.  To mak...
8 comments
Read more

Push button Ezypoints

 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 successfu...
Post a Comment
Read more

Project Updates

My apologies for the shortage of posts this month due to shortage of writing time while I've been  focusing on other projects. Speaking of projects, at the last Cumbria Group meeting we were updated on two very interesting developments. Firstly Mark Bradley has made great progress on his operator messaging project which was featured in September 12 A timetable of train movements has been created initially on a card system so that operators were aware of which trains to expect or prepare for the next sequence. The movements are now recorded on  a memory card and each record is sent by the Arduino Mega via it's I2C bus to the relevant display or displays. Different display types have been tested and the records can be advanced or reversed in single steps or in tens. The code is available from Mark for those interested. A second project this time from Tony Hoath, featured a complex scissor crossing with route switching using Arduino controlled relays to ensure the relevant polari...
Post a Comment
Read more