Since the last post I have been a bit all over the place with things.
Re the Pi, I was able to autostart the IP addressing broadcasting which was a great relief. I have done a few tests on the Edimax mini dongle's wifi range when connected directly to the Pi and via a powered USB hub. Quick summary is that for any decent range, the wifi dongle of any type does need to be powered via a powered hub. Connecting directly to the Pi's onboard USB ports does not give it sufficient range apart from maybe a couple of meters at the most.
Lachlan and I installed the donated lights a weekend ago without burning ourselves with the soldering iron. I was able to accomplish this by jacking up the layout using Triton Multi-Stands to a height whereby we could sit under the layout. This worked great up to the point where I seem to have thrown my back out! Anyway we connected the grain of wheat bulb based lights in parallel using a 'accessory bus' of speaker wire. This seemed to do the trick momentarily but it looks like I had made a short and the little Hornby controller fritzed out! Stuff all voltage was coming out of either the 12VDC controlled terminals or the 16VAC accessory terminals. Damn! I connected up the lights to an old H&M controller I have and the same thing happened but the H&M has a auto fuse I think which cut out before any damage occurred. I found the short, fixed it, and reconnected the H&M 12VDC regulated directly to the lights to see if 12VDC worked ok. It did. Maybe it is the type of bulbs? Anyway I mentioned to Mr Mackie and PK the need for another controller and Mr Mackie kindly offered some of his old ones. At the Club Meeting on Saturday, we tested a couple, and found one that seemed to fit the bill. After the Club, I went home and connected it up. The 12VDC regulated control was a bit finicky and not very responsive but the more interesting thing was when I connected up the lights to the 16VAC terminals and turned the line slide switch on the test loco only moved when both the accessory switch was on. When I turned it off, the loco stopped. Very strange as the power sources should be separate inside the controller. The lights also went on momentarily then turned off for no apparent reason. Most troubling. As a back up I had been keeping an eye on an old Hornby PSR (P?) type controller on Ebay. This was similar to the controller I had when I was a boy. It had both 12VDC and 15VAC accessory terminals. Time would tell if I decided to put a bid in. So today I decided to buy a new controller. I went to Hobbyrama and bought a Gaugemaster 12VDC controller with 16VAC accessory terminals. I came home, wired it in, and once again the accessories played up, but the track control was ever so smooth. Could it be the lights need 12VDC?? Not sure. Anyway I was lucky to win the auction and hopefully this may answer the problems. If so great. If not, I have another spare controller!
The IR transceivers have yet to arrive from China. Must be on that slow boat! So no PIC programming started yet.
I was able to put together a Dapol war memorial kit through the week. OK it only had three parts but it is a start! I've moved back most of my equipment to the study from the shed where it has been since the carpet was laid and I had to clean out the study of furniture. I have a couple of weeks before the painters come so maybe I will concentrate on that 73 Class?
I was able to do some work on my layout with trying different concepts on the motive depot side's backscene. I looked for some photo-realistic images on Google and only came up with a Mill. All the town high street scenes were modern image, not 1950's or 60s. Many of the photo-realistic backscenes you can buy just didn't fit properly. So I will have to make a compromise and use model realistic type scenes similar to the Scalescenes buildings I am using. I stumbled on a site http://www.wordsworthmodelrailway.co.uk/ which has free scene and kit downloads which might fit the bill. I printed off some backscenes and brick wall arches and have temporarily blu-tacked them up to visually check them out. As expected the image is not photo-realistic but I guess the end result I want is in the depot itself and not the backscene, which is just there to fill in the blue sky! So I might progress with this just so that it is out of the way.
The other thing that happened at the Club was a father and son had started up their own home based laser cutting business. They had some initial models made up ready for gluing to show the other members and as Lachlan and I were leaving Tristan (the son) offered Lachlan one of the laser cut wood buildings for free for his layout. Lachlan was over the moon and now I have to glue it up and we will then place it on Lachlan's layout. It is very Australian in prototype and probably not something you would find in Alaska, but you could do it up like a boat house and place it near a river or lake, which Lachlan does have.
That's all for now. My time will probably be devoted to either the 73 Class &/or trying to work out the problem with the lighting on Lachlan's layout.
This week I was able to start looking into this by starting with a fresh Pi install and going from there. I was able to get the wifi dongle to broadcast in Master Mode which allows it to become an Access Point, but this wasn't without pain and a few manual interventions, when it should be autostarted upon a boot up of the Pi and be fairly seemless as you want it to be running in 'headless mode' (no monitor). So some further investigation into this. Secondly I need to check the range of the broadcast for use with both the JMRI smartphone apps and the Wifi Walkie Talkie apps.
I didn't get around to starting any kit modelling unfortunately, however after much pestering from Lachlan, I decided to donate my old 12V incandescent street lamps for use on his layout. So he did some hole drilling and gluing in of the lamps. Matthew also helped with one or two of them where he could reach them. I installed an old slide switch near the Transformer. So now I guess I will have to get underneath the layout and wire them all up without burning myself on the soldering iron!
I also ordered 10 IR transceiver combo modules from China for the princely sum of A$1.61 for the lot to use on some experiments and the rail crossing detection project Mr Mackie has suggested I investigate with PIC programming.
So this week probably more on the Pi, maybe start a kit, more than likely burn myself soldering Lachlan's street lamps, and maybe, just maybe look at the PIC programming OR some time on my layout.
On Sunday morning just gone, I and thirty other guys had the pleasure of listening to a presentation by Davy Dick. Davy is a very prolific electronics designer, forum contributor, and presenter from MERG (Model Electronics Railway Group) in the UK. Davy is from the West of Scotland Area Group and was out here on holidays at the Sunshine Coast. One of the Brisbane MERG members was able to coax him down to Brisbane for a few hours to meet other MERG members and present a talk on train detection methods.
He then stayed around to give advice to the meeting on how best to setup a MERG Area Group in South East Queensland (SEQ). He was a very nice guy to talk to, his accent was not that bad. I even offered him a Scotch Finger biscuit at morning tea, but with a confused look on his face, he politely declined. I had to smirk!
This week I am concentrating on trying to get the Edimax wifi dongle (micro type) working on the Pi, and if I have time perhaps put together one of the many building kits I have stored away, just for something different to do.
So what has been happening since my last post?
I was looking into Mr Mackie's layout comms to determine whether a wireless solution could be found. As most people have access to a smartphone of some description and these have wifi connectivity, I thought what better place to start than with something that is not going to cost you anything.
I set myself some loose parameters in determining what to rule in or out.
1) Is there an app either on Android or iPhone that could be used (sorry I have no idea about Microsoft smartphones)?
2) The app needed to be reasonably priced or free
3) The app had to be able to work in a private wifi LAN (i.e. not connected to the Internet)
4) It had to be easy to setup
5) Smallish storage footprint
The basic intention was to utilise a private wifi LAN to connect the smartphones to so that communication between operators of a layout could occur. For instance at exhibitions, at a large layout operating session, at a club, or anywhere that such 'private' communications would be required.
For my wifi LAN I utilised my Raspberry Pi as a wifi access point (see article elsewhere on how to set this up). Other people could set up there own private wifi LANs by using other devices. The range is purely dependent on your wifi access point's coverage.
After a number of weeks of part-time research I have come to the final recommendation of Android apps to use. Unfortunately I have no iThingy experience in this. There were some apps that could be used for both types of OS, but these needed Internet connectivity as the 'server' was online.
Apps researched
Zello - no good as logon requires access to the 'Zello' server via the Internet
Voxer - same Internet requirements as Zello
Tikl - needs access to Internet server. Needs access to phone or Facebook Contacts
WiFi Walkie Talkie - can unicast or broadcast but you need to know the IP address of each connected device. No 'Contact' or 'Connected/Visible' address book. Difficult to use
Wifi Intercom - needs a 'Contact' list for network but doesn't tell you how to do it. May not broadcast, only point to point.
WiFi Talkie - user interface not visually nice. Difficult to use
Wi-Fi Talkie Lite - immature user interface. No apparent 'Talk' feature
Virtual Walkie Talkie - this was one of the final two contenders.
- This app can be used both on public and private networks.
- For private networks it has the ability of either setting one of the connected devices as the master with an inbuilt server or set up a PC or Linux machine as the server. I tried setting up the Linux server on the Raspberry Pi but I was having problems. Might just be me so I can't comment on this aspect but it wouldn't be a show stopper.
- The user interface resembles a walkie talkie and you can select different channels to converse on. Might be handy for group defined channels i.e. central controller, yard controller, specific loco chat, or at exhibitions for different locations or people?
- It has a small storage footprint of 778k
- It requires Android 1.5 or above to use, so a good chance you could get an older Android device second hand if you do not have one readily available, or you want to carry a small amount for group usage
Android Intercom - this is the other final contender
- Can work in both private and public networks
- Easy to setup, no need to identify a master inbuilt server as it discovers who is on the network
- Requires storage footprint of 1.4M
- requires Android 2.1 and above
- sometime experienced an echo during testing but I wasn't sure what the cause of this was. Could be feedback between devices if to close together or the speed of the network wasn't fast enough, or there where to many concurrent conversations happening which delayed transmissions or repeated transmissions.
- it might just come down to setting some basic rules around correct radio etiquette!
So my recommendations at this point in time would be either Android Intercom or Virtual Walkie Talkie, in no particular order. Just give them a rty and see what works best.
I haven't had a chance to test in an operating session and also with JMRI Engine Driver running on the same device to see if this is an easy thing to switch between or if it becomes a pain in the @rse!
One good thing in my opinion is that it allows walking around without constantly plugging in. If you are using PC headsets you can get an adapter cable that brings the two ends together into one so that this can be plugged into a smartphone if the usual smartphone ear buds/microphone are not available. The other possible thing you could do would be to utilise a bluetooth earpiece (with microphone) that is paired with the smartphone in question. Thus no cable dangling around your person, just pure wireless connectivity.
So I think I will leave this for now and maybe test at the next running session at Mr Mackie's to see if it is a valid solution or not.
The other things I actually did on the weekend were I ran the VR Walker railmotor on the club layout and it went very smoothly. I also started to do some work on the Bray MPD side of the layout as this has not started apart from the track being laid. I have yet to finish the Kensington Hill side of the layout but I need a change for the moment.
I haven't got anywhere near the 73 Class!
Well hopefully that has filled in the gap since the last post?
Well not much happened in the way of modelling over the Xmas-NY fortnight I had on leave. The family had other ideas and a few chores to do around the house while I had the time.
I ordered and received three books from Amazon on kit and scratchbuilding (loco, rollingstock and country buildings), two of which were written by George Dent from Model Rail magazine fame, so there is a start for the new year! Yet to read them though.
The one priority job I have vowed to finish first though is the completion of the 73 class loco which has been sitting on the workbench looking pretty but not much else! I reckon if I can't get the wiring sorted and placed correctly then this may be a 'bridge to far'.
I'm also going to seriously look into JMRI panel control as well integration with the Raspberry Pi.
So better not put too much on the modelling new year's resolutions list just in case I don't get there.
Auscision duly replied to my email advising that I should of returned the unit to the place of purchase for a replacement, as was their policy. Pretty silly when you think about it. Mike at DCC Sound found the factory fault and fixed it for me for no cost. Under Auscision's policy, I should of advised Mike to stop work. Pack it up. I pay for postage to South Australia back to Orient Express Models, then have them check to see if it was a factory fault. And then, if it was and if they had another one of the same model in stock send that one back to Mike for continuance with the decoder install. If they didn't have the same model in stock, they would have had to get one in from Auscision, who would have had to pay postage to Orient. Does this sound logical? I don't.
I can't fault the customer service of Mike at DCC Sound. Similarly Orient Express have been good to me in the past. But Auscision's customer service has a lot to be desired!
So the railmotor arrived last week. I have only been able to test it briefly on the programming track as I have stuff all over one side of my layout in temporary storage. I might be able to shift some of it around and get it operating over the Xmas break. I could only hear one of the speakers working, so not sure if the other one has a problem, kicks in at higher speeds, or something else. Anyway the more important thing was that the decoder didn't blow!
Well that's it for this week.
I wish all my blog readers a very Merry Christmas and safe 2014.
Since the last post Mike Walters at DCC Sound advised me that ESU (Loksound) had advised that it was the sound amp on the chip that blew. He suggested a number of possibilities but the best thing would be to send the model and decoder back to him and he would look into what had caused the problem to start with. No point getting the replacement if it was to blow again due to a factory problem with the model's wiring. I thought the postage to Victoria would be a small price to pay to get someone who knew about decoder installs into this model to make sure everything was OK. So I mailed the model and decoder. A few days later Mike was in touch. He advised he found a short in the speaker wire circuitry from the moor board. It looks like the wire insulation had melted a bit more due to a possible factory resolder which caused two wires to touch when the body shell was on. He said he would fix this, as well as give me a second speaker for 2nd class for my troubles. The decoder couldn't be replaced under warranty but under repair. He still gives me a new decoder but I had to pay $42 for the repair, which he sends back to Germany and gets fixed and returned to his stock. I thought a great deal all up. He also suggested advising Auscision of this situation to see if they will come to the party to recompense me for the repair postage. I've duly sent an email to Auscision and wait their reply.
Apart from this no modelling on other stuff.
At the Club Modelling Comp weekend just gone I didn't win anything this year but Lachlan got the President's Award again for his Alaska Rail Road diorama entry.
Until next time.
