Lumsdonia R&D Dept Workbench

[TimberSurf]

Excellent.stuff. seems to be a little twist at the end though? Doesn't stop it being awesome but I guess you are trying to iron that out?

It's only a test rig, when all the joints are tightened and screwlocked, it should be nice n tight

So after a lot of tweaking and adjustments, I finally got the four point car lift to work smoothly.

Four point Car Lift

[Mountain]

Excellent work there. Was a lot of effort to make a car lift work. Glad it gave decent results.

[TimberSurf]

Not much moved on the development front, I have done some experimentation with static grass. I have effectively made a static grass box utilising my greenescene applicator and using it to make tufts and flowers on cling film. At a recent show, I indulged myself with a decent airbrush, to which I will keep my gummy old Humbrol enamels away from it. Thus I need acrylics! So happened on a deal at antenocitis workshop of a £1 a bottle and got one of every colour! Bargain
Can't wait to play with my new toy, that brass on the car lifts can now have a fine colour scheme that does not interfere with the workings!
I will feel less reluctant to use airbrushing more often now that I have an easy clean tool and media. Next I need to experiment with cheap alternative (home made) Acrylic Airbrush thinner, Acrylic Retardant and Flow improver

[End2end]

Brilliant.
Great smooth lifting action.
Thanks
End2end

[TimberSurf]

I am trying to make as much as possible on the layout work, as well as just the trains. So lighting is important to me.
You can buy these, as modern with a blue circled arrow and yellow patch for £3.95, but that works out as a lot if I have half a dozen!
It can't be that hard to make , can it?
I was thinking of casting in resin, but it just struck me that I have some square styrene tube, shove a 3mm LED up it, print a "Keep Left" logo, cap it and hey presto, 6 made in 3/4 of an hour! Plus more suited to the 60's era.

Keep Left 5.jpg (33.57 KiB) Viewed 3701 times

Keep Left 1.jpg (17.01 KiB) Viewed 3701 times

Keep Left 4.jpg (28.29 KiB) Viewed 3701 times

Now back to the drawing board and casting to make lit petrol pumps!

[TimberSurf]

Well I bit the bullet and dug out my Arduino boards again!
Managed to get the USB to serial working and connect and program the Arduino.
Turns out that is the easy bit!
I started with a traffic lights program, didn't like any I could find on the web (too simplistic) for two way, did find a complex one for 4 way control, but I am not modelling a inner city!
So made my own program with no delays, using states. 28 phases with 8 states.
Cool, one down a dozen to go!
Next the servo's, tried many and got them working, but not happy, as they don't allow both servo's to move independently.
It seems I will have to get my head round millis or class modules to get multitasking!
I knew learning a new language would drive me nuts!

[TimberSurf]

Well I cracked the multitasking, the other day and got both servo's to move independently and randomly. So while in the mode (I think the bug has bitten) I decided to have a go at a similar program, to drive two servo's and lights for a level crossing with barriers. That done, not sure what next. Might do one for a gated level crossing while I am at it. I have a PCB that does it, but it just drives all servo's at the same time. I could write a program that does a slight offset in the gate timing and add some bounce to the gates closing and an output to drive an mp3 player to give the "clatter"!
Sound good? (pun intended)

[TimberSurf]

Brilliant.
Great smooth lifting action.
Thanks
End2end

It's a con E2E, it was me twisting a potentiometer that gave the smooth movement! Now I have cracked the Arduino and some fancy programming, I can drive it automatically so both lifts are completely independant and go up and down after appropriate pauses (unattended)

If you can't wait to see it all in action, you will be in a queue behind me, but work is getting in the way!

[TimberSurf]

I could write a program that does a slight offset in the gate timing and add some bounce to the gates closing and an output to drive an mp3 player to give the "clatter"!
Sound good? (pun intended)

Done as above, fully functioning in the simulator!
Next to work out the mechanism and fit LED's to the indicator board
That reminds me, I need to buy some amber leds!
It might be a 6 (chinese) week wait for the video!

[TimberSurf]

Found a UK supplier at a good price so Amber LED's turned up 2 days later. I have a mishmash of bits of all sorts of level crossings, so have picked out the best bits for my purposes. A few holes and some grinding in the grey plastic and I have the servo's linked to the barriers. The LED's are fitted and wired down the brass pole. This plate will sit in a very large hole on the layout so will be easily maintainable. So I need to create a multipole connector, to join this to the arduino and the second plate for the other side.

[TimberSurf]

Well the new batch of Arduino Nano's arrived today, so had a play at downloading the program and running things off it (actual hardware rather than just in a PC simulator). Mostly successful, it runs beautifully off a battery, but once on a power supply, things went pear shaped!
First issue was the the lights started flashing, as if it could not boot, discovered my power supply is not as smooth as I thought, so a big 4,700uF cap sorted that (I am sure a smaller one will do later). Now as the servo's and the Arduino run on 5v and my auxiliary bus (non DCC for lights/animation) will be 12V, I got some buck converters to reduce the voltage from 5V to 12V, for each arduino around the layout. The one I tried is fighting me, shows 5.5V when disconnected but drops to 2.6V when connected? Needs some investigation tomorrow (I'll try a second one)

[TimberSurf]

I discovered the problem with my voltage reducers, I had not wired up the negative!
There are four terminals, so I just assumed two in and two out! Turns out the fourth is an enable and both negatives go to one of the other three.

I made an interesting discovery tonight!

It seems you can solder steel together! (albeit coated in tin)

I have made some fencing from 12mm tall staples, by soldering them end to end, with surprising ease .

[TimberSurf]

I went to do my first ever rolling stock repaint with my airbrush and hit a problem. My airbrush has always been a bit problematic, attributed to using very old Humbrol enamels. Since moving to acrylic and getting a quality airbrush, most problems have gone away. I know I am pushing the limits by using artist acrylics and household paint, but even so, with patience of experimenting with mixtures and pressures, I should obtain reasonable results.
I am now ready to paint the bodies of the Jetstar project, having started with a rattle can primer, I tried the first topcoat with my airbrush. It was not working well and trying to increase pressure, I suddenly realised the air compressor was running all the time and never cutting off, as unable to get up to 4 bar. In fact I could barely get 0.5bar.
Something was wrong with my AS186 compressor!
I had no other option than to strip it down!
It was very quickly apparent that the reed valve on top of the piston was bent up. A quick fix to straighten out and re-assemble. No-go!
After several strip downs and rebuilds with micro adjustments of the valve yielding no satisfaction. I was perplexed. Eventually I tried testing the output of the piston head on its own (having re-assemble not only the head each time but also the connecting pipe to the tank) to see if it would make pressure without the chain of connector/tank/regulator/hoses. Blow me if it cut off straight away when I plugged up the output with my finger!
So the connecting pipe was leaking, I replaced the two O rings that form the actual seal and hey presto everything works as it should do!

[TimberSurf]

As you may be aware, I do 3D printing, so I thought I would have a go at designing and printing 3D Tree Armatures! I have tried many times to make them with the bent wire technique, but with little success (never look right). They take 15 hours to print, so may not be commercially viable, but it gives me a method of creating dense forest at a very reasonable cost (albeit that it will take weeks to print them). I am putting these down as a success, may need some further work on the foliage, but the the armature looks pretty good I think!

[TimberSurf]

This has probably been the longest running development I have done! I have never been happy with the clunky Market stalls available off the shelf and wanted to create some that were more to scale. After dozens of test prints to get the balance between strength and fineness, I cracked it. The other element was fruit for wagon loads, in the field, platform transit and shops, again, the off the shelf solution is just paper prints and I wanted some 3D element. It was over a year ago that I printed my first fruit in a box. Very realistic, but a pain in the rear to paint inside without getting overlap on the box sides! As these are 6x4mm in OO, they are very small to print and a nightmare to support for the printing process, hence it has taken dozens of designs and prints to finally get an insert that fits snuggly in the box, meaning that the two can be painted separately, then fruit dropped into the box. I am super happy I have cracked the principal and can now create an incredible Street Market with super detail in 3D, as always, I design mostly for my own satisfaction, but am happy to share the fruits of my labours (yes, pun intended).This weekend saw the release of 37 new TimbScale 3D prints products at Scale3D, including an extensive range of Fruit 'n' Veg with removable inserts (for easy painting) and many other shop display products, and some fine scale market stalls to put them on!