Saturday, June 04, 2011

New Talheim panel in the works

Alright, I enjoy the panel in Emsingen so much that I'm building a similar one for Talheim (and will build yet another one for staging). Because the trackwork around Talheim is fairly complex (which should be an indicator that this will be an eternal bottleneck, but let's not go there...), Talheim routes are set by pressing two buttons on the panel at once, and the switches are lined appropriately. Well, at least they are supposed to.

The baseboard of the panel is done. Again I made this from hard-board. The buttons and LED holders are installed, and partially connected to the Uhlenbrock 63400 Switch-Control unit. I should be able to test-connect it to the layout tomorrow, and program the Switch-Control for the various routes.

This panel will replace the existing Talheim panel which was a lot of work to build, but turned out to be impractical to modify for the Kopper siding, as well as cumbersome to add LEDs or additional switches to it. I spent weeks building the old panel and the control board, mostly because of the many wires and solder connections needed to connect LEDs, buttons, and switch decoders to each other.

The new panel controls switches using LocoNet, so it doesn't matter which switch decoder controls the turnout, and they all work and behave the same.

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