Recent content by diesel

Are you sure it really got on the electronics? Any moisture in the ballast will trigger occupancy sensors. If so, it will return to normal in about a day after it dries out.

Except, the green band will be red. A brown-brown-green-gold is a 1.1M resistor, a 1k is a brown-black-red-gold. Just in case...

Just one thing though... you said detection. There is no track occupancy detection with this, only switch position indication. You can add a dwarf so there are two facing the points, connect the red/green in opposition (by wiring them in parallel), so the through track is green and the other is...

It's directly from my phone. I just found it there after the train passed. The shooting mode was incorrectly set to "pano".

Boy, was I surprised when this trailing unit showed up on the main! Does anyone have any information about it? It seems to be somewhat inspired by the DD40-AX experiment, but with three trucks and two prime movers. I wonder how long it will be before all the road units are upgraded? I guess the...

Try putting a 100uF capacitor directly across the servo GND and 5V, at the end of the extension. It's more likely to be a power issue than a signal issue, the servo PWM is too slow to be affected much by cable layout, to a great extent.

That is not correct. Most DCC decoders support DC operation now, and although it's not terrific performance-wise, it has been possible to run DC locomotives on a DCC layout since the earliest versions of the standard, using pulse-stretching.

What is powering the servo's? Where does the +5V line in your drawing come from? I sincerely hope your "-5" is actually a ground, or you are applying 10V to the servos. Also, I hope you are not powering the servos from the Arduino. I'm not sure about that shield, but a lot of them that run...

Amen to that. Also good work lighting and magnifier if need be. Knowing when to quit and leave it for tomorrow, too.

I've already coded and tested this idea (of a completely software driven method), on PIC, Arduino, and STM32 processors. Another thing you need to do, is condition the ramped LED output with gamma correction, because a mathematically linear ramp "bunches up" all the brightness at the top of the...

You can get a resistor assortment pack from sites like Amazon, for incredibly cheap. All the values you would ever need. Remember different colour LEDs may need different resistor values for the same brightness. Once you know the values that match your LEDs you can order packs of those too, in a...

It seems all very easy when it's only one locomotive involved. But for a complete layout? DCC happened because an NMRA unofficial committee (which evolved into a formal working group) undertook a deep, detailed task of not only standardizing the existing Lenz technology, but improving on it...

There is a non-obvious reason for twisting the wires, it reduces RF interference emanating from the layout. You don't need a twist every inch to make it work, even if they're loosely wound like a twist every one or two feet is enough. Mine are not twisted right now, but I'm going to fix that...

I can't make any sense of your posts, but from the image I get the impression you might be replacing incandescent (glass + tungsten) bulbs with LEDs, and not including the critical current limiting resistors. That will burn them out really fast.

It does, and JMRI running on a computer can automate it. It's freeware.