April Progress

April has seen school holidays and the usual reduction in available working time and this coupled with me being away from home for nearly two weeks has resulted in less than usual progress.

I was talking on Skype to Peter in Traralgon last night and he made a comment about looking for the update on my blog to which I replied yeah look at the end of the month - today whilst working on the wiring for the Hornertown Control Panel it dawned on me that we were in May and   ...this update is late....   Thanks Peter for the subtle reminder!

Hornertown has been the main focus of the work this month with improvements to the town scene, more yard tie painting, coach yard buildings, billboard and control panel wiring. Some work was completed on my signal logic and operation circuits whilst I was away from home.


Hornertown

Town Scene

BJ has been adding details to the town scene 100 odd figures, benches, telephone box, litter bins, etc

Yard Ties

Bj has started the tie painting of the yard.  The yard tracks are to have a different colouring to the mainlines.  More detail on this next month.

Control Panel

I have started the wiring for the 26 yard points.

At least this panel is a lot smaller than the last one!


Coach Yard

Some work has been undertaken in placing the line side buildings used to "hide" above board point motors between the main line and the coach yard which is in front of the flour mills.

Billboard Sign

Some time back I bought a Miller's sign and I put it together last Monday night whilst at a construction night at Barry's.

Signals

Sometime back I found a circuit on Rob Paisley's website that looked to me would do what I wanted so I purchased lots of components from RS Components as they are very cost effective compared to Jaycar or Tandy's (Radio Shack).

I got a scrap of 3mm MDF and I used miniature toggle switches to represent block occupancy detection and turnout position with common cathode red/green LED's to simulate signal heads.  The test includes bi-directional movement over seven main line blocks, a passing siding and a branch line.

Rear view - the PCB in bottom left is a 12 volt 1 amp regulated power supply

My first breadboard attempt - It actually worked ok...

My first 8 module board.

I need to build two more 8 module boards so I have enough circuits to test the logic for bi-directional operation.  Once I have established the diode matrix for all the inputs the "modelling" of the proof of concept will be complete - this should happen some time this year.

Thanks to the Monday Night crew and BJ for all their efforts.


Till next month.

-ooOOOoo-