Thanks to Mark Tatlow for hosting today, and to Oly & Chris for great company. I think all four of us made progress on various projects. Mark was making holes in the side of a nice looking Gresley Buffet, and had made them disappear again by the end of the day.
My own projects were to try and complete the build of the MERG DCC system for SLAG’s Bankside project. I had to cut a new support for one of the PCBs and jigsaw it all into the case. I succeeded at the first task! Re-assembling the boards (it is a bit of a jigsaw puzzle), I discovered one of the internal connections wasn’t mating correctly, so that will need replacing in another session.
Here’s one of the boards, captured to record which colours I’m using for connections (note to self: green: 0vDC, Blue, +5vDC):
This one replaces the buzzers the system uses by default to tell you when there is a short or other fault. By translating that information onto CBUS, we’ll be able to have buzzers or LEDs at any control station. Hopefully those will be more useful in noisy exhibition halls.
For the afternoon, I dusted down the Tornado chassis I’ve been looking at for a while, and assembled two more links for the Walschaerts valve gear.