Sunday 30 December 2012

Christmas goal achieved!

I set myself the goal of having something working over the Christmas break and I achieved it - for all of 2 minutes!

Firstly I twisted lengths of wire together. Technically you only need to do this for long runs but I decided it would be beneficial on tracing faults to have teh wires woven together. With Jill's help we were able to wind together 15ft of wire at a time using the Dremel. I then soldered on 30 individual wires to the different sections and it looks like this.


The pair of wires that feeds a section I want to detect in is fed through a DBD22. The AIU is in place to take the output from the detector. The other piece of electronics is the UTP panel. The other board looks identical.

I then connected up the NCE station and it worked first time. The mainline points are very smooth. There was no jumping and despite not yet having wired the frogs the engines ran well.

Unfortunately I then shorted the layout and it all stopped. Most has come back to life but not everything. I suspect I may have damaged a decoder or I just don't know how to use the new equipment. The basics are definitely right. Now I need to go back to Kevin at CoastalDCC and purchase some short circuit protection.

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