Back to the Breadboard

So, it turns out there’s such a thing as a pull-up resistor that pulls a pin away from ground so that when the pin is shorted to ground using, say a micro-switch connected to a valve rope on a water tower, the microcontroller can detect the change. Without the pull-up resistor, the input is said […]

Tender Truck Proof of Concept

The first print was too tight, and the second print was too loose. The third print was just right! So after playing with the action for a few days and showing it to my friends, I soldered some .010″ phosphor-bronze wire to some custom-made brass tube bearings, and assembled the truck. Honestly, it could roll […]

Productive Group Modelling Night

For about a year, the local NMRA division has hosted a group modelling evening. Despite it being only ten minutes’ drive for me, my calendar never seemed to line up. This Friday I finally made it. I brought along the soldering iron and the project board for the water tower, and wound up wishing I’d […]

Are New Trucks the Answer?

The resolution of the mystery derailment at turnout 5 continues to elude me. I’ve spent hours watching that leading wheel of the tender truck kissing the rail and floating off at the critical point. The more I watched it, I became less and less convinced that it was ever in proper contact with the rail. […]

Water Tower Circuit

The breadboard for the water tower has sat on my desk long enough that it finally transcribed itself into a diagram to start making the circuit permanent. Despite the apparent complexity, it is in fact just four simple circuits mediated by software in the microcontroller: I’m certain this could all be achieved with hardware, but […]

Water Tower Animation

The gubbins for the inside of the water tower have come together at last. Once the noise maker was working, it was a straightforward matter of programming to make it all work – at least in the unit and integration tests! When I went to upload it to the board, however, there were still some […]

Water Tower to get Noisy

After almost two weeks of avoiding manuals, while scanning blog posts and speed-watching the occasional tutorial, the speaker attached to the DF Player Mini attached to the ESP32 board burst into song! Along the way, I procured more bread boards because the ESP32 is too big to fit on a single one and allow connections […]

1120 Gets a new Decoder

Open house mania is not finished as I’m expecting another visitor in just over a week. So, I’m wasting as little time as possible in getting 1120 running again. The new connectors arrived from Mouser almost overnight, and I drove out to the Far East to pick up a LokSound 5 decoder from Intercity Trains […]

Bachmann Connectors

If there is one good thing about the decoder in 1120’s tender blowing up right in front of Steve Stark’s eyes, which he brought all the way from Victoria so he could point them at Pembroke, it is that I get to replace the six wires between tender and engine. They may be 28- or […]

Engine sand

Even today, locomotives want a small amount of dry sand for traction. All my resources are tacit about where they kept engine sand in Pembroke in 1905. There is also zero information about the purpose of the third stall in the roundhouse. For years, I’ve thought there was probably a pile of sand somewhere and […]