Sean

will try and get that for you this evening im also trying to put together sound projects for the jmri virtual sound decoder, only at the very early stages though,

dont suppose you can get your hands on a spare buffer beam for mm201 dave?

I dont have a specific guide but you need to put the loco onto the programming track and then open decoder pro and click add new loco, you get a list of decoders to chose from here but its best to hit "read type from decoder" and JMRI should select the decoder type automatically, when you have the loco added double click it and you will see a box pop up containing loads of different tabs. scroll down and hit read all sheets and jmri will read all of the settings from the decoder 1 by 1, takes a few minutes........ make any changes and the write sheet options as you can guess writes the new settings back into the decoder, you can write an individual sheet or the entire decoder from here so take care to select the right option. i cant really give advice beyond this as im using ESU decoders however all the steps up to this point should be roughly the same. FUNCTION MAP FUNCTION OUTPUT and FUNCTION SETTINGS are where you will find the programming options for the lights. (you want to be in function map for the initial setup) if you want I will read off the function map from an ESU decoder and post it up here. you would just have to change the physical wire parameter to suit your own decoder. you dont need any sort of special programmer at all with jmri, just pop the loco on the programming track. its possible to get the marker lights working independantly to the headlights with 141/181 using this programmer, a feature i know some users struggled to get going with other systems.

this is what we got as revenge.....

whys it being piloted by a really creepy looking boris johnson lookalike? i really enjoy seeing different exports of the EMD locos's the GL8(121) in particular went around the world and can be found in loads of gauges. https://www.facebook.com/ferromodelismorealrail.trenes/posts/1391265241059234/ theres also the GA8 variant making up a pretty large family of motive power. notice the tiny bogies on this one! I certainly never noticed those foreign 071 variants before now!

sheeeeesh same seller, not a bad deal until you realise youve preordered far superior versions of the same thing due in a few months.... maybe he wants these sold quickly so he can fund the new ones haha

Ya but can your loksound do this?? VID20220330210254.mp4 IE familliarity and training day on the new Caribbean prime movers The stay alive capacitor is going to be 100% needed so not gonna post up any diagrams or parts lists until I find out how they fit into this..... I have no diodes so unless I can find a nice circuit without one I'm snared until I order more bits. There seems to be a few at least so I may experiment. That's definitely the hardest part sussed

some lad in canada with the same sort of notions! seems to be a general theme on ebay of limited run or niche stuff going for 3-4x its worth not long after the production of them winds up

so I made this today. For one reason or another my BT board released its magic blue smoke and no longer works. I don't think the regulator was properly regulating. Oh well. Thus I have had to concede that my electronical theory isn't up to scratch for putting together the 5v regulator part of the circuit. It's not all bad though as I did get a better understanding of how the bridge rectifier works as well as the seperate components in the BT board and because of this a new baby gm friendly version has been developed and will be assembled on Wednesday in 201. With a few to doing 141 as soon as we get a successful run done. Unsure of doing 121 due to the convoluted railing system so that could well end up being the one that gets a proper esu. Beyond that I have some other fun stuff planned with sound but next in line will be point and signal control using servo motors and finally layout lighting.

facebook killed off the majority of good internet forums, so its still good to have at least one stay active

I dont want to move the station as its sort of "built in" to the side of the hill i have made and i have a nice plan to integrate those, i also like having the bit of space to show off a few model cars. as for the buildings though do you mean moving them into the blank space between the fuel and hard standing? in reality on the layout that bit is all covered by the freight yard, however your comment has given me a little idea. I do want to expand the bottom siding a little which would give trains a proper straight run to couple up to 3 flats. to do this i would probably have to delete the buildings, moving the road off to the very left hand side. the main purpose of the buildings is to disguise the transition where the train leaves the layout, but in practice i need bigger buildings. what i might do is build a new embankment on the left hand side. a bit wider this time and with a road on top. the road can run over the top and it can ramp down and meet the platform that way, this would give plenty of room to display a few cars whilst also covering up the trains route in and out of the layout. it would also completely bypass the sheer annoyance of having to keep the road closed for long periods of time whenever a train was shunting in and out of the yard, a practice which was sure to enrage most of the locals before long!

really cool idea about the turntable david, unfortunately I have built a hillside and permenant platforms on the layout now so any changes like this would be a major reconstruction. I can still make changes to the left hand side of things. I am considering investing in hunt couplings, they seem to be a good solution with easy uncoupling but we shall see, im still messing with track ideas. thankfully the crossover i have any bogie stock poses no issues, somthing extra to think about though. went and set this one up as I already have all the track in stock so its just a matter of altering things on the baseboard. had a play with it and everything works and asthetically operations on the middle siding look for better than they did before. it has however introduced a new trope of anything that parks in the loop will need to move out of the way for middle siding access. not ideal, workable but slightly annoying. so upon looking closer i soon seen a solution that allows the turntable to stay whilst allowing for the wider loop as discussed earlier. now the middle siding has a nice straight drive in, and all points will work without issue, unfortunately you could park up a full lenght train in the middle siding before and with the new plan that will be no longer possible. which brought me to this design, seems to capture the best of all worlds so far, middle siding is better now because it doesnt start on a turn, another great cause of coupling annoyance. the bottom siding DOES, i am considering changes to make it one set track longer, which would eliminate the last of the coupling annoyances. this would also mean a redesign of the street area, which has not been permenantly built just yet anyway. so it could well happen. the fuelling siding has been shortened but this is not a big deal. tankers are always removed after delivery and otherwise one or 2 locos can be parked up there.

these were released in january for £350 there are unpowered units available too for mad money VAT on top of course

the last time i paid i brought in some old components via address pal (think a few old xeons and 32gb or so of ddr3) got stung with a hefty hefty bill that was nearly the value of the components with no means to actually appeal it. have since stopped buying cheap components. that was either 2020 or 2021.

wait what....... postage is included now too? They arent even stickers, they are a big metal plate!

Thats actually super surprising, i had assumed that esu would want to cease and desist him to bits for such use of their ip but all the better if not. im probabaly going to end up buying at least one loksound in the end due to nextgen so theres always that angle to it. (on a slightly unrelated but surprising note, I think the JMRI software decoder is based on the audio engine from the game trainz, at least thats what some of the notes within the downloaded sounds suggested to me,the guy seems to have just repacked the sound from trainz plugins, i wouldnt be surprised esu used somthing similar to assemble all the final sounds....somthing to revisit if i end up not liking rocrail) your right about needing a stay alive, could be even more annoying than with an actual decoder cutting out as the unit rebooting could drop the bluetooth connection altogether. at least the long wheelbase of the 201 makes it extremely reliable in that regard but they seem like a simple addition either way. https://www.therailwire.net/forum/index.php?PHPSESSID=bd6099c6664fb31e9a4f5dce765aa087&topic=29654.msg321036#msg321036 have done a bit of digging with the google tonight and somthing like this should do the job well im thinking. it is explained in depth on the linked forum but some modification may be helpful for my purposes. BR1 is a bridge rectifier, connected directly to the rails this will give us a dc power source. R1 is a 150 OHM resistor for overload protection, i shall leave this alone. C1 is the stay alive, the bigger the better, should be ample room for a large cap within the 201. R2 is another resistor with an unspecified value(experiment until you find one you like) its in that circuit to set LED brightness however this will not apply to our application and the circuit as built so far will be supplying 15/16vdc which could blow up our bluetooth board so I will most likely exchange this component for a voltage regulator . this should in theory give us the 5vdc we need to power up the board without stealing power from the lokpilot. its going to take a week or two to gather the components as shipping is high and id like to add a few other bits to make it worthwhile. in the mean time if anybody spots anything glaringly obviously with this plan and or schematic please do chime in and let me know. I shall also keep searching for smaller components as i want this in my baby GM! much easier doing the R&D on a big loco though.

i used to use nothing but parcel motel and free uk postage, them were the days.

If the last post didn't give it away I'm gonna be working with a 201 class for this. The baby GM's are a bit too small for the PCB I got so that will have to be looked at again. The A is still too new to go pullin apart. Loads of room inside this so I won't be hard for space. I DO have another railway planned for it eventually anyway Top off and a borrowed from another loco decoder fitted to ensure it all runs. Loads and loads of room inside this body shell, I will simply just gorilla tape the board in as shown above. Pin 12 is on the very left and will be easy to solder a wire to the pad here. Pin 20 is earth and it's in the middle of this connector so much harder to add a wire to. I'm gonna seek out alternatives as I know too well how to ruin a PCB Yup. There's 5v between these points with the loco on the track. This pad is earth according to the multimeter and verified with the esu Manual. Painless to add a wire here. There are no components to damage with heat. Bit more hassle soldering this. As expected I bridged loads of the pads with solder but I persevered until it was on. Made sure the decoder still worked at this stage So With all this said and done it doesn't work. The Bluetooth board keeps on power cycling as if it is not getting enough current. The decoder does not respond at all. As soon as the Bluetooth board is disconnected the decoder begins working just fine. To me this is either one of two things. Either the board isn't getting enough power from the decoder. Or is there a possibility that it's still an ac current at pin 12? Not really sure what's going wrong so may have to wait until someone more knowledgeable can chime in with any suggestions. What about taking power directly from the rails and converting it to 5vdc?

"perhaps ensure everything is working before trying to power it from the unknown" - probably somebody wise VID20220323231419.mp4

Sound board arrived today, it's already mounted inside of a loco (pics to come) https://dccwiki.com/21MTC_Connector Time to start probing for 5v, I think the earlier suggestion of pin 12 could be the way to go. Once the multimeter confirms that I'll trace it back to the easiest solder point and we will pick things up from there

nah its still 25 for an old scooter. the one good thing about the global shipping program is that all the charges are paid in advance so customs typically wont interfere with the package. in the case of a motor vehicle its still all down to VRT as far as i know. Think ive found a niche that commands even more money than irish GM's https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/353935855151?hash=item5268388e2f:g:lugAAOSwWGdhwxHO tube stock!

chaps, I can import an entire 1:1 scale motorcycle with a real working engine that goes brum brum and i would have to pay less than that in taxes and charges to get the thing road legal here. infact i have in the past through the GSP! I thought second hand stuff wasn't taxed as harshly or at all. guess i thought wrong

60 quid in taxes on an ancient toy train, jesus wept..... would be a good deal only for that.

Little has happened over the last few days. Set myself a little ultimatum of you've got a nice layout built up so calm down on scenics for a little while, get it wired and play trains for a bit. You've been watching the news too much again anyway! I also really need to appraise how well the design works and make any nessesary changes before scenic stuff becomes more permanent and difficult to change. Midway through the wiring process, during a test session of running different rolling stock it was quickly realised that the original trackplan was unviable. As the series of points leading into the middle siding was causing all sorts of weird derailment issues with most stock. A quick alteration to the track plan was made and things have been running much better now as a result. I can't take rolling stock into the loop still but that's not really the end of the world once every other movement is reliable. So with that all said and done and the track given a good clean it was time for an IR driver and shunter training day. The aim was to assemble the ballast train on the loop with a component from each of the sidings, this allowed me to give the new pointwork a good running test to see if there are any more hickups, and bar one everything seems to finally be running lovely. Not much of the session was captured on tape however the instructor did manage to get out for a short clip near the end of the session. VID_20220322035424.mp4 Seeing her run that slow over hard standing for the first time definitely brings a huge grin , as did being able to run trains like this for over an hour with very few technical snags that will be fixed by the time I do another track cleaning. Next up turntable. I'm getting the boss and turntable pieces cut out tomorrow so that won't be long in coming together!