fighting procrastination fifteen minutes at a time

Tag: DCC

Two Brains

#125 Mini DIY DCC

The 2FS mag came through the letterbox the other day. In it is an interesting article on amongst other things DIY DCC. I have rather been out of the loop with DCC as I have not had a layout to run it on and also I’ve not been in a club environment for a long time where they have been using it on a group layout. It struck me about this particular article was the simplicity of the set up, and the flexibility of it. One forgets that often we are bound in to proprietary systems to keep u buying additions or because they offer something that other manufacturers don’t.

Yes I know I can hear the people saying that it’s not that easy and that you can’t just plug a play. But let’s face it, if you have the bent to be interested in the electronic to that point you maybe able to fathom the depths of the diy digital. The fact that there is so much open source out there is testament to the back room hackers want to do something differently.

I for one fully support this and will be mashing up my Arduino and Raspberry Pi and teaching myself some programming stuff to control my little world, and with technology being so cheap, there’s never been a better time to do it!

There’s also information available at the DCCwiki

Until next time..

Table top tactics

Having spent the last couple of days unpacking boxes I reached a bit of overload and the ‘stuff’ I had accumulated over the years had mounted up. I am really quite amazed at the fact that I had all of this with me whilst living the life of a contractor and out of a suitcase pretty much. So at least I am getting to the point that I know exactly what I have although I keep thinking that I am going to uncover an unmarked box full of stock that I had forgotten all about. Like the one today, full of US Z scale stock. As I have indicated the narrowing down will help focus but what of the moment? Well thats where the table top railway comes in. A bit of fun in 00 as I found a bunch of stock that I thought had long gone. Obviously sense prevailed in the last cull 🙂 The loco and stock are no where near the same eras but hell its my railway and I don’t care. I also have a childhood Hornby J73 (I think, as its not in front of me) which will need a strip down, clean and lube and I am going to put in a Lenz decoder if it turns out to be a good runner, if not I am going to stick to DC.

The plan is, there is no plan. It is there to just get out when the mood takes and do a bit of shunting/switching using a simple dispatching method using dice, or an online dice program.. hmm that reminds me must learn some coding. Don’t plan to add to this and am going to go with the no scenery but might mock up some card buildings that can be used for the industries. I think if it can all fit into one box that will be good.

Anyway off to PLAY

00shuntingplank