Gibbon, Cozad & Western - "The 100th Meridian Line"

[C855B]

I hate to ask such a personal question but are you extravagantly rich or is property next to you just ridiculously cheap?
If I was guessing values I'd say that abandoned house lot would be worth about 200-300k and the tiny apartment a similar amount.

Is the big red barn-like building to the north surrounded by grass where your layout is?  How far do you live from the layout?
It' seems so fun to be able to gobble up a whole block and make serious plans about fixing the area up. 

My gosh... easy answer: ridiculously, stupidly cheap. Try 1/100th of your guessing. This is the advantage - and burden - of living in a small Midwest down outside of commute distance from most middle-class jobs. We have a junior college, a real hospital, a prison (yuk!), and a couple of small manufacturers... and that's it. Oh, plus small retail to support that base. We have just enough of a middle-class and modestly-funded retirees like us to make the coffee shop viable.

Yes, the view from Google shows the extent of the "Lawn Ranger" territory, and the soon-to-be-demolished house expands that. We live eight blocks from the layout building, just far enough from the tracks get an uninterrupted night's sleep.

And, yes, we're having loads of fun. Conversations over breakfast are animated and amusing, discussing project plans, what's getting done, what got screwed-up... and that we're single-handedly supporting the local Sherwin-Williams store!

[Specter3]

.. and that we're single-handedly supporting the local Sherwin-Williams store!

This just made me LOL!

[Mike C]

Oh, my... the fun continues. It weathered last night's storms, but gave up the ghost this morning. Guys at the car parts store across the street saw it fall:



City is all on board with the teardown, just need to get the title transfer finished before the bulldozers do the deed.

Hey you could sell that as a "handymans " special !   

[C855B]

Minor renovations:

[Scottl]

So much awesomeness in this thread.

[VonRyan]

Ahhh, the sweet smell of demolition.

Personally I would have been inclined to save the landfill some trouble and used the place to roast some marshmallows, but to each his own. 

[C855B]

Tempting. It would've saved a boatload of money - the deal with the city doing the demo is that I pay for the roll-off rental and tipping fees. The bulk is needing four roll-offs. Ugh. The guy doing the work said he'd try to dump as much of the concrete as he could into the basement hole, but all the other stuff has to go to a landfill.

The neighbors were all but standing around cheering as it was being knocked down.

So much awesomeness in this thread.

Thanks, but... I'd like to see more model railroading. This past month has just been brutal with all the distractions. With the kid in town on break we've been nose-to-the-grindstone on fixing up the guest house he uses, hoping to have it rented by 10/1. My shoulders ache from drywalling the kitchen ceiling this week. We'll be up to the wire with other fix-ups. I keep telling Robyn that we absolutely must get the ceiling done in the layout room by mid-October so we don't have $600 heating bills again.

We close on the apartments next week. I'm not going to get real excited about renovations on it until next spring. There are some priority repairs to be done before the cold sets in, but generally it can just tick along as normal for the next few months. If we can make it happen this way for the fall and winter, there ought to be real layout construction. I'm already snapping the chalk lines for the benchwork... at least in my mind. [sigh]

[C855B]

With a couple of the main distractions abated for a few days, I returned to working on the ceiling in the layout room. There is one more row of tiles to install before I have to get serious about the umbilicals for the stage and track lighting. As I was up on the lift it suddenly dawned on me that I have never tested the network interconnects for the lighting, nor have I run more than the single original test light. That's just not going to do - if I assume everything works and just "put it up", I am at great risk of spending hours on the lift debugging stuff.

So... tonight's "floor testing":

This is one bank of six lights (of four banks of six) being run through a test sequence of the main color values. The sequence starts with UV, fading to all-on at 100%, to 100% of red, green, blue, amber, white, UV, then ending with all values on. Video is hand-held with an iPhone, and aside from the slight shakiness the colors and brightness aren't accurately captured since its exposure control didn't like the transitions to and from dark.

Anyway, this is a reasonable preview of the effects lighting for the layout. With all 24 installed there won't be enough general lighting for "daytime" operation, but add the roughly 64 white spots (8 banks of eight) with each bank under separate control it will be plenty bright in there with a lot of flexibility.

[C855B]

Well... sorta good that I did the lighting network tests on the ground - found a bug with the DMX controller I was planning to use for the house lights (the dimmable troffers). These lights are controlled by a somewhat standard dimmer system with a 1-10VDC signal where 1V = 10% and 10V = 100%. Problem is, it has to be full analog. The DMX controller I had is intended to drive LEDs or similar, and uses PWM emulation of analog. The lights didn't respond to the PWM, only recognizing the full-on value of the square wave.

I played around with an RC circuit to smooth the PWM into DC, with success on the bench and hints at a working result when live-tested. But it never controlled the entire dimming range when hooked up to the lights. One "known" was this simple solution requires a constant load. However, I discovered that the lights, for some reason, increase their loading on the control circuit as they dim. WTF? I was expecting a high impedance on the control channel, but noooooooooo.

It would be possible to fix what I started using an op amp follower on the RC filter, but this is more circuit design than I want to get into (or have the time for). So the solution has to be a DMX-to-10V analog adapter. There are several off-the-shelf controllers like this that are puckeringly expensive, but I think - or hope - I have found one that solves the problem for relative pennies. It's a bare board, but that's not a problem since this is behind-the-scenes stuff. Fingers crossed.

[davefoxx]

Wish I could help, but, geez, all I got out of that last post was:

Well... blah, blah, blah... found a bug... blah, blah, blah...  house lights... blah, blah, blah.

I played around with an RC circuit... blah, blah, blah... success on the bench... blah, blah, blah... but noooooooooo.

It would be possible to... blah, blah, blah...  puckeringly expensive... blah, blah, blah....  Fingers crossed.

In other words, this is waaaaay over my head, so there's not really much I can offer other than to say, "Good luck, and I hope you persevere." 

DFF

[C855B]

Talk about losing the audience!

Since there's a smattering of technical how-to in this novella, a little bit of electronics engineering chat wouldn't hurt anybody. Well... at least I didn't think so, now that I hear the heads exploding. 

[Scottl]

A link to that PWM to voltage converter would be of interest.  I have a controller in the lab with PWM output that could be put to use with a proper interface.

[davefoxx]

Talk about losing the audience!

Since there's a smattering of technical how-to in this novella, a little bit of electronics engineering chat wouldn't hurt anybody. Well... at least I didn't think so, now that I hear the heads exploding. 

No, Mike, I was purely making fun of my ignorance on the subject.  By all means, please continue on.  Who knows, I may actually learn something.

DFF

[C855B]

Scott, here's an ultra-cheap board from China, one of several that popped-up in a search:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/PWM-to-Voltage-0-10V-Digital-Analog-Signal-Tranformer-Converter-Module-PLC-/301557918983?hash=item463640ad07

I found a lot of these, but as you can see in the specs they can't take a load - 10mA is about enough to be a reference voltage and that's about it. Technically I could use one of these because the combined lights will draw about 5mA on the control circuit, but I would rather not convert a converter, especially when the end result has so little operating margin. So this is what I will get:

http://www.elmvideotechnology.com/DMX-512/DMX-to-10V-Analog-Converter-Switch-Relay-Driver-16-Ch-DMX10V-PCB.htm

It's direct from DMX512 to 0-10V, with the bare board handling four channels at 20mA. It's a better integration for what I need, anyway.

Dave, I guess my thinking out loud is for "introducing" DMX512 lighting control for MRR applications. My issue was a minor kink in doing something a little different. The cost of DMX components is plummeting. Maybe not to the point of replacing plain dimmers, but, OTOH, for the guys considering LED strips and other multi-color background lighting, the basic control system has a lot of flexibility, even to software interfaces that replace the slider panels. Not that there's anything wrong with the slider panels - they're cheap, too, even with programmable scene sequencers. Bang-for-buck is very high.

Contrast this to the wireless, consumer-oriented RGB light bulbs I was testing at the start of this project. The multi-color programmable bulbs like Philips Hue and OSRAM Lightify are still $60 each... after nearly three years, what's with that? Maybe they're fun, but I wouldn't want to drop the coin necessary to outfit a layout with them, and in the long run the smartphone-only control systems with required Internet connectivity are clunky and inconvenient.

[Scottl]

Perfect, that will be ideal for my application.  Thanks.