I’ve decided to try to segregate my posts into two categories: Model railroading posts of interest to a general audience, and posts about electronics of interest to a more restricted audience. To this end, I introduce Railstars, my new blog about model railroad and general electronics. I’ll still cover my DCC installs here, but [...]
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 Tomix N-DU-202-CL Throttle: Nice! My layout is an oval of track that I occasionally set up on my desk. Sometimes I add turnouts to this oval. Some of my trains have been converted to DCC; many have not. When I want to run a DCC train, I pull out my Digitrax Zephyr; when I want to run a DC train, I pull out my low-end Tomix DC throttle. I like them both, but neither is entirely satisfactory. In particular, neither offers anything that even approaches realistic operation. Last year, I got the opportunity to do a little driving in an EMD SW1, and the fine-grained level of control you get over a real locomotive makes my Tomix throttle feel like a light switch. What to do? Get a new throttle! Here’s a guy on the cutting edge of modern model railroading. If designing and building your own DCC booster and command station doesn’t establish your model rail electronics creds, I don’t know what does. Lately, Steven’s been experimenting with using the Arduino platform, and churning out some really interesting proof-of-concept circuits for automatic control [...] 
LED Driver prototype 1, fully populated. Having recevied my PCBs, all that remained was to assemble the parts onto one and test it. Assembly took a couple of hours, but that’s because I was being careful at each step. I can now say that I am pretty comfortable soldering SMD components; having a [...] 
The boards I received in the mail, about two inches long by one-and-a-half wide. I built a prototype. Then I designed a PCB. This weekend I received a set of my very first custom-designed circuit boards. It’s quite a thrill to hold an item manufactured to your own specifications. Best of all, I [...] 
LED Driver Prototype 1 So, what is this monster power supply going to power? LEDs, and lots of them. Some of these LEDs will always be on; some will be on under certain circumstances (e.g., on a day/night cycle); many will have special effects (e.g., traffic lights). To accomplish all of this, I [...] |
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