Emsingen town area

I've been building the support structure for the town of Emsingen over the last week. Since the town will sit on top of the ramps between the layout levels, I'm planning to make it at least partially removable. 

The brown area will house the Emsingen freight shed near the track. Depending on how space constraints work out, it will also support the lower parts of Emsingen, with the upper part of town (including the market square) sitting over the ramps in the corner. I simply used a 3/4" sheet of styrofoam (aka "Styropor") as the base, and cut it to the right shape. Messy as usual. I also reduced thickness a little bit around the freight shed area, so that the floors of cars on the track are at the same height as the loading dock. That said, the shed needs to connect to a small loading ramp that extends along the side of the track. The current arrangement is too diminutive. Maybe also scratch build an extension for the shed?

The "brown area" from below

The support framework will get in the way when cleaning track. I hope that by making the town removable, I can work on the town at the work bench in a somewhat comfortable seating position.

Boo-boo of the week

Oooops. Vertical clearance for the Prechtal staging track (center of photo) is 5 mm too low. That needs to get fixed.

The top of a wall

After walking through Andy's Hobbys in Morgan Hill (not much train stuff there, but a good seletion for model car and plane enthusiasts), I picked up a piece of dimensional balsa wood that I figured might work well to top off the wall I added last year.

I managed to bend the balsa just enough to match the curve of the wall, and pinned it in place until the glue sets. I'll find out tomorrow if the glue will be strong enough to hold the piece in place. As it turns out the top is a bit on gracile side compared to the track ties. Oh well.

Eventually, I'll add a steel banister to prevent switch crews from falling off the wall.

Town and Freight area supports

I'm about to fill in the empty corner in the back of the room shared by the freight shed, and the town of Emsingen. The bracing supporting the lower lying freight area and first row of houses is framed and glued in. I really need to get cooking on the layout of the actual town, and the detection sections in Hochwaldtunnel. While the town will be removable, access is starting to become tricky...

Thank you!

Got some nice wine from a co-worker today :-)

Racing Fuel

Seen at a 76 gas station in Saratoga. Yes, that's $7.99 per gallon of Racing Fuel.

View from the office

From the extended weather forecast, I knew the rain was coming. Yet it was at the same time exciting ("yay. Wind and rain, and I'm in the middle"), and depressing ("urgh. I'm cold and wet. Want to sit by the fire and sip some hot chocolate").

Books

Seen in the office library.

I love the combination of titles right next to each other.

Let it snow

Contrary to last time I was in Cambridge, MA, today we got a real dusting of snow.

Ohne Worte

At the station

As I was waiting for my train home today, a northbound express Caltrain raced through Mountain View's Castro Street station at high speed. Like this ...



... When it had passed there was a lot of excitement on the north-bound platform. A group of teenage girls with their luggage was discussing the experience:

"Oh my God, that was so cool!"
"Yeah, it was ... like ... it almost hit me."

"This was ... like ... so ... like ... soo cool!"

"Wow!"

"I was ... like ... standing here, and ... like ... the train was passing here. All that wind, and ... like ... noise. I've never had seen that before."

It's nice to see people ... like ... get excited about trains.

Sunday at Point Lobos

Definitely one of my favorite places along the coast...

Hochwaldtunnel, part 2

Before I can permanently mount the "rocks" around Hochwaldtunnel, I need to build the actual tunnel tube.

Hochwaldtunnel portal

The tunnel portal is from Faller's premium series and made from foam. While the visual effect of the stone work is pretty good and it's easy to work with, overall I'm not particularly impressed by this tunnel portal. The foam is quite brittle, and I managed to break the portal near the crown stone. You can see the "fix" in the second photo below.

For the first part of the tunnel liner I'm using Noch granite wall stone paper. Yet another product I'm not impressed with, so I'm wasting it on the insides of tunnels. It has a nice stone structure embossed in the paper (contrary to some of the truly awful Faller stone papers), but the stone color is quite nasty, and to top it of, the sheet has a shiny finish (how lame is that?). When I paint the tunnel portal in the next step, I'll also paint the liner fading to black in the back. After the stone paper is plain old black construction paper, cut to fit. I like using construction paper inside tunnels since it has a flat finish, is reasonably sturdy, while still flexible enough to bend out of the way to gain access in emergencies. And of course, it nicely creates the "pitch black" look of a tunnel as demonstrated in my first tunnel built last summer.

side view

Since Hochwaldtunnel butts up against the room wall, the track inside is curved, and I need to be able to access the tunnel from underneath the layout, the tunnel "tube" is modelled only on the right hand side of the tunnel. The left hand side is open for access. Because of the room wall, one can't see the left hand tunnel wall. I will likely make it just a "curtain" of black construction paper once the tunnel is installed.

top view

The last photo from the top nicely shows the curved arrangement, and how the black construction paper acts as view block for folks attempting to look straight into the tunnel portal. I made the ribs supporting the paper tube from corrugated cardboard this time. The plywood ribs used last time are very sturdy, but the extra sturdiness wasn't really worth the additional effort compared to cardboard. I glued everything with Titebond II, a waterproof wood glue, that develops a good tack quickly, dries clear, and works very well with most porous materials.

Happy New Year

It's beautiful here. 

What will the new year bring?

Let's jump onboard and find out.

Hochwaldtunnel

First test arrangement of the painted tree bark. It looks quite OK on the right, but the pieces above the tunnel portal are too regular. I'll probably either break or replace the middle piece to get a bit more variety. The gaps between the pieces will be filled in with either Scuptamold or sculpting plaster. The top of both walls will be filled in with plaster and vegetation.

While the inside of the tunnel is pitch-black on the photo, it's not quite as dark in reality. A tunnel liner is in the works.

Bluetooth micro keyboard for Grumpy

I picked up this micro keyboard on sale at Central Computers. It connects via Bluetooth to Grumpy, my MythTV box, and acts as a regular keyboard and mouse pad in both X Windows and the text console. It's functional, yet tiny. I wouldn't use it for programming, or email, but it's perfectlly sufficient for MythTV's keyboard shortcuts and or typing in a search box.

I'm using an Ambicom USB Bluetooth receiver, and the standard Linux Bluetooth stack. Adding the keyboard to Linux was trivially easy with the Gnome Bluetooth applet. The keyboard is found and recognized automatically. Aside from the Bluetooth pairing process no configuration was required.

Asus AT5IonT-I, MythTV, HDMI, Debian squeeze = no sound

Grumpy, my MythTV computer, is getting a hardware upgrade. I wanted a fanless motherboard with onboard graphics, which severely limited the choices. Eventually I settled on the Asus AT5IonT-I which comes with a dual-core Atom processor, NVidia ION2 graphics, Gigabit Ethernet, all digital video (DVI and HDMI), one PCI-E expansion slot.

I later found out that the Deluxe version of this motherboard has a DC 19V input, so could be powered with a common laptop power supply, and run completely fan-less. Oh well ... instead I found that this is the first motherboard in the house that has a 24pin ATX12V power socket. While the socket accepts the traditional 20pin ATX plug, I opted for a new power supply with a temperature controlled fan (Antec Basiq 350W). The setup runs *very* quietly, especially compared to the previous setup.

Since one of the Seagate replacement drives showed up recently, I could build the new system without having to take apart the existing system. The install with Debian Squeeze worked reasonably well, with the only hiccup being my indecision on what I wanted the file system layout to be, and the need for building the RAID array with a missing drive. The AT5IonT-I comes with a RealTek GigE network adapter, which needs non-free firmware. One needs to jump through a few hoops to get the firmware file in place during the network-based install.

Migrating MythTV was surprisingly easy. I mostly followed the instructions from the MythTV site, and eventually moved one drive from the old system to the new system. After a few hours of copying, the files were on the new disk, and I could add the old disk to the RAID on the new system.

So far, so good.

Then the trouble began. The usual dance debian-style to add the non-free NVidia drivers quickly produced a decent desktop picture. I adjusted the resolution to 1360x768 instead of the default 1280x720 reported by my Sharp TV. Oh, did I mention that this motherboard has a HDMI connector? Sounds great. Though, there wasn't any sound. An extended excursion into the depths of ALSA, HDA, and HDMI sounds on Linux followed. What a mess.

aplay -l consistently did not show the NVidia sound card with HDMI. alsamixer always told me that "This card has no controls", so there was no SPDIF output to unmute.  Debian Squeeze comes with alsa 1.0.23, and a NVidia 195.x driver for kernel 2.6.34. Combine this with the setup of the AT5IonT-I  which has both an Intel HDA sound, and NVidia HDA HDMI sound built-in, and I could not get HDMI sound working, no matter what probe settings I chose, manually loading kernel modules, etc.

Eventually, I relented and upgraded the machine to Debian Wheezy (i.e. testing). It comes with alsa 1.0.24, NVidia 290.x and kernel 3.1.0. The usual apt-get dist-upgrade dance took place, which included a fun Perl dependency during the uninstall of libwmf0.2-7 failing on File::Copy (hence aborting the dist-upgrade leaving the packages in an inconsistent state) because we got a partially updated Perl 5.14 module set.

However, once that was all set and done, setting NVidia HDA HDMI as the default sound card in the Gnome Audio Settings, and adjusting the MythTV settings, I got crystal-clear sound. I also set MythTV to use VDPAU for hardware-accelerated video-playback, which substantially improved the video quality of 720p and higher recordings.

All of this would have been A LOT easier had I trusted my gut and installed Wheezy from the start.

A side-note on GNOME3:
What have they done to this previously really usable window manager? It's not quite as annoying as Ubuntu's Unity, but the default GNOME3 is merely pretty and looks good. Once one tries to use it, workflows that used to take one mouse click and a drag, now require at least 3-5 mouse clicks on different parts of the screen.
I can SEARCH for an app by TYPING its name in a search box. How brain-dead is that for a desktop environment?
It appears that the developers took all the ideas of MacOS and Windows (the ones that make you move the mouse a lot), picked the worst of both worlds and combined them into GNOME3.

Regular GNOME3 also interacts badly with the menues in MythTV frontend.

GNOME3 Classic with the regular menu structure is usable, and works fine with MythTV frontend, though if I encounter any more issues, I'm switching to another window manager.

If it weren't for MythVideo, I'd run MythTV frontend without any window manager...

---

After all this trouble Grumpy really deserves its name now. While this whole exercise took almost 3 days of elapsed time, it was a learning experience, so at least I got something out of it.

Freight Depot

While gathering all the pieces I need to rebuild a computer for the train room, I also made progress on other work items on my list.

The freight shed for Emsingen is almost done.

Gueterschuppen (office side)

Gueterschuppen (street side)

Visually, I like the office side of the freight shed a lot better than the rear side. Since the track serving the freight shed is to the right of the station building, I'll likely arrange the shed so that the office faces the the station. The drawback with that arrangement is that there's only the short covered loading ramp facing the track. And the office is in the way of loading doors, too. Oh well, when there's ground to put the shed on I'll try out what works best and go from there. I need to add the lights for the loading ramps, as well as a little lamp above the office door, and I'm still toying with the idea to add actual office furniture inside, but only if it'll be visible from the Emsingen operating pit, so that will have to wait a while until I make up my mind. The shed is painted and lightly weathered. I especially like the effect of the corrugated roof.

Hochwaldtunnel with bark "rocks"

Years ago I read about a method to make "rock walls" from tree bark. Pascal and I tried that out yesterday, and while the color of the rocks came out a bit too dark, the result is definitely workable. 

Hence the "Hochwald project" was born:

Before going back to work on Jan 3rd, the plan is to finish the rock cuts around the Hochwald tunnel entrance, the tunnel portal, as well as the trees and deco in the Hochwald corner of the layout. 

The semaphore in the photo is the north entrance signal to Talheim, but won't stay here. Instead I'll allow switching moves all the way to the tunnel portal and add a "Halt fuer Rangierfahrten" sign to the tunnel portal. This matches the detection sections I already set up, and makes explaining the Talheim switching limits a lot simpler. Even though, after I added Kopper furniture and related switches in Talheim, most operators don't use this section of track for their switching moves anymore at all.

The Talheim entrance signal will be imagined to be on the "other side" of Hochwaldtunnel and be represented on a signaling board mounted to the back wall, whose LEDs will be controlled by the SIC24D that drives the Emsingen panel. That signaling board will eventually also display track occupancy of the long tunnel track between Emsingen and Talheim.

The semaphore will become the south entrance signal of Emsingen.

Christmas Tree is done

10 feet - 500 lights - 4 hours

Merry Christmas