March Update

This month my has seen me: visit Traralgon, My Ops Session, Fast Clock Slaves, Model Rail Radio in Adelaide, Ops Session at Wayne's and Speedometer Construction Notes.

Visit to Traralgon

This month I had the pleasure of spending 8 days with Peter enjoying many fine wines following our daily activities including arduino projects and a day visiting fellow model railroaders following an introduction by Peter Jackson.

Peter's Speedometer Build

I challenged Peter to build a couple of projects.  With the Speedometer project I gave him the construction notes I had developed with Derek's help.

Peter offered some "improvements" to the documentation following constructing his working speedometer.

Visit to Bill Black's

We drove to Emerald to meet Bill who hosted us for lunch and a visit to his ANIMAS & LABATO SOUTHERN Sn3 layout.  The scenery was exquisite.  We spent so much time talking then visiting Alan Rocket that we did not have any time left to operate any trains - Maybe next time!

I prepared a collage of photos I took in video form which can be viewed below.

Visit to Alan Rocket

Bill arranged for us to go see Alan'd Puffing Billy layout in the nearby suburb of Monbulk.  Again some exquisite work and I was fascinated by the model of a stage coach which was totally scratch built including the spoked wheels and buckles on the harnesses worn by the horses.

The layout is DC powered.  Once again I  prepared a collage of photos I took into a video including some live running.  It can be viewed below.

My Ops Session

With Tom Barbalet coming to visit I organised an Ops Session.  It was based on my new operating regime however I squeezed in another Operator and this caused me to work overtime operating the master control panels. 

Thanks to Tom, Gloria-Don Moyses, Barry, Rosslyn, Wayne, Peter J, Peter S, John, Brenton, Des & Derek M for a great day,  There were a total of 50 Train movements handled by 6 Operator groups.

I learnt a couple of lessons from the session which was good.  Local control panels are proposed to make life easier for operations at Jimtown and Adamsville.

Master & Slave(s) Fast Clock

You may recall I wrote in June 2017 update about how I developed a Fast Clock. Since then I have been thinking well I need some slaves and started thinking about how to do that.  I tried sharing the signal from the Arduino to a number of displays using parallel wiring and this did work.  Further thought was that this wiring was low voltage and some slaves would have a wire running around 25 metres. Given there was power plus control signals it would need to be in a shielded cable to avoid interference.

I wanted a wireless solution!

So Google and YouTube searches started and using elements found in YouTube Libraries from Ralph S Bacon, Julian Ilett, SETISAEDU, ForceTronics, Electronic Ho Chi Minh and Andreas Spiess.

With my first effort I successfully made a Master and one Slave.

Whilst it worked the update speed was not correct and it did not have any of the brightness controls I wanted to incorporate.

Well getting the the multiple slaves working was not easy!  I used the idea that I would have a central transmitter and four receivers - wrong! The nRF24L01 WiFi can support six slaves however I discovered that the centrepiece is the receiver and the slaves are the transmitters. 180 degrees away from my initial thinking so I had to recast my thoughts.

So I setup the Arduino Uno R3 giao tiếp module nRF24L01 gồm 1 Master và 4 Slaves by Electronic Ho Chi Minh after translating (using Google Translate) all the code notes and comments.  This program only passed one "byte" of data and I wanted to pass and "array" of data.  However the LCD display was useful as I could check if transmissions were effective as I retained the "LED" on and off which was mirrored on the LCD.  To get the "array" data I used the principles outlined by Andreas Spiess in his #38 Advanced Tutorial for NRF24L01 and Arduino #2 Reliable Connections video.

I finally cracked it!

Model Rail Radio in Adelaide

I had the pleasure once again to host Tom Barbalet for a day so we visited Don's, Wayne's and Rosslyn's layouts.  After some lunch I hosted a Ops Session where Tom was the Engineer on the Jimtown Turn which had 8 separate movements.

Afterwards we had a BBQ and Tom recorded another South Australian Take Over Show.

It was great to see Michele Barbalet again to - she was taken on a "partners program" too thanks to my wife and daughter.

Tom & Michele

L to R Tom, Rosslyn, Peter S & Des

L to R Rosslyn, Peter S, Des, Don & Brenton

L to R Brenton, Wayne, John, Barry & Derek

After the festivities I need a big glass of red....

Ops Session at Wayne's

Unfortunately I had to deal with some family matter and only spent the last half of the session there. Barry was unwell so a smaller team than usual however Brenton was visiting so Don, Brenton, Rosslyn, Des and Peter S joined Wayne for the full session and I crewed with Peter S.

Speedometer Construction Notes

It is done ready for the Clinic...

Till the end of April.....

-ooOOOoo-