This must be a new record for me: Two successful decoder installs in four weeks. The Skyliner motor car is, thankfully, a straightforward install with only minor gotchas. Read on to see what I mean. [...]
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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!   A Keisei AE100形, headlights blazing. Ok, yeah. I said my next DCC conquest would be my Kato 651系 “Super Hitachi”. I lied. Besides, I said that, what, six months ago? I don’t have the necessary decoders on hand to continue work on it, but I did have the necessary decoder for this model, the Micro Ace A2896 Keisei AE100形 “Skyliner”. What makes this model challenging is that the headlights and the markerlights are not lit by distinct LEDs, but by a single bi-polar bi-color LED—a single monolithic LED that cannot be split apart into two distinct circuits for control by two distinct motor leads. Read on to see how I got it working.  Update: After consulting with TCS, I no longer recommend the TCS Z2 decoder for this installation. Sadly, the TCS M1 is too large for this installation, and so I have selected a Lenz Silver Mini to replace the Z2. Previously, I showed how to disassemble the tamper down to the point where we can proceed with decoder installation. Let’s move forward with the decoder installation itself.   The Duomatic itself. Stop. (Collaborate and listen.) You just bought one of these fancy Lemke ballast tampers, and you are considering converting it to DCC. You can read a little German, maybe, or at least you can work from photos; or you found another guide on the web. It doesn’t look so hard. Don’t believe everything you read.  My family’s Christmas, er, New Year’s layout, Shogatsu, has been retired for the year. We haul it out of the basement for only a couple months each year, around New Year’s, to work on it and display it. This year’s time is up. We made some small progress on it, especially in forestation and village construction. New concrete retaining walls were built, and our village received a bath-house, a liquor store, a long string of merchant stalls for the New Year’s festival, and a portable shrine being hauled down the main street. It also received a new bit of rolling stock, a Tomytec モ1030. Before we packed it up last weekend, I made a video of it, below.  Test-type in Cylon training school. A couple of nights ago, I hooked my custom LED Driver up to an Arduino running some custom software, and 16 LEDs. And, who’d have thunk it: Worked on the first try! So many things could have gone wrong between the circuit design, the hand-soldering (jumpers, burn-outs), and the programming. But [...]  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 good iron does [...]  オロネ25-901 (with body-mount TN coupler) and オハネ25-100 (with truck-mount TN coupler) Not every Tomix or Micro Ace train accepts the fancy-pants body-mount TN couplers. Sometimes you have to make do with compromises. Which is what Tomix’s truck-mount TN couplers are: A compromise. They work, but they’re not nearly as cool, and don’t look quite as good. And they’re harder to install. But, in the end, I think they are still worthwhile to bother with. Here’s how to install them.  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 ordered two, but [...] |
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