Akihabara Station » lighting

LED Driver

D.E. Goodman-Wilson — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 02:43:02 +0000

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 [...]

Kitbashing a Power Supply

D.E. Goodman-Wilson — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 01:59:03 +0000

Time to catch you up on what I’ve bee doing lately.

Homebrew power supply

The title is something of a mixed metaphor, but it will serve. An important step for installing a ton of LEDs into a layout is having a solid power supply. So a couple of weeks ago, I converted an [...]

Small Successes: SMD Hand-Soldering

D.E. Goodman-Wilson — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 05:24:15 +0000

Hand-soldered SSOP microchip in breakout board

I suppose that not all is bad, previous posts notwithstanding. Illness has conspired to prevent me from sharing much of what I’ve done lately, but as I’m feeling better now, here is something new.

Tonight I discovered that I can solder SSOP SMD components by hand with [...]

Electric Company

D.E. Goodman-Wilson — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 14:11:10 +0000

Stock photograph of the BBB Arduino Rev E (mine's actually a Rev D)

This weekend, I completed assembly of my first Arduino, a BBB (Bare Bones Board) kit from Modern Device Company. Thanks to Chip for the board! I haven’t tested it yet, because I don’t have, as it turns out, a suitable [...]

Doing Things the Easy Way

D.E. Goodman-Wilson — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 13:34:31 +0000

Breadboard circuit

After success building circuit described here on breadboard, I began construction of something more permanent this past weekend. But, as I did so, two events conspired to frustrate my efforts. First was the discovery, thanks to a member of the JNSForum, of the Lenz LF101XF function decoder, which does precisely what [...]

DCC and End Cars: The No-Cut Conversion

D.E. Goodman-Wilson — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 17:17:13 +0000

OSHI25-901 circuit board

This is the lightboard from the OSHI 25-901 dining car from the Tomix 92950 “Yumekukan” set. This board sits in a fitted pocket in the galley of the dining car. There are three SMD LEDs (the three white boxes on the left); three long lightpipes run from the LEDs to [...]

Headlights and DCC (Part 2—Practice)

D.E. Goodman-Wilson — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 00:33:55 +0000

This is the third in a series of articles (title above notwithstanding) about getting a Kato KIHA 110 working with DCC. In this first part, I hooked a decoder up to the motor, and got basic functionality going. In the installment, I outlined how wiring headlights for DCC works in principle. In this article, [...]

DCC and Headlights (Part 1—Theory)

D.E. Goodman-Wilson — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 23:11:15 +0000

Read the prelude to this article.

Update (31 Dec 2009, 10:41AM) Corrected the schematic illustration showing how to connect a decoder to LEDs. The LEDs were connected backwards, oops!

Update (21 Feb 2008, 10:07PM) In an earlier draft, I noted that the two endcars were treated completely differently. This, as I quickly realized, is [...]