Untergroeningen: Trackwork (3)

[ Untergroeningen posts ]

[ part 2 ]

When I planned segment three, I flipped the direction of the crossover compared to the prototype because I figured it would be helpful to have a passing siding on the way to Slim Staging. Let's just say that wasn't such a great idea. It makes switching the ramp cumbersome. Remember, the prototype is (almost) always right. Change the track arrangement only if you really thought it through. Over the last couple weeks, I slowly reworked the crossover, reusing one of the turnouts.

  Here's the segment on the workbench. I'm remounting the Tortoise turnout motors.

Aligning the track on the segment so that I get maximum length and width of the ramp, while not diverging too much from the existing arrangement took a little bit experimentation. Now I just need to fit the curve to the Welztalbahn connector.

For curves I prefer to install the puko-strips the old fashioned way using brass screws in the roadbed on the centerline and soldering the puko-strip to them.

The surrounding tracks rest on a thin strip of cork. I glue the strips to the roadbed to get the same track elevation.

After some fiddling with the track piece, a few swear words, and some patient convincing the curve is properly aligned on the puko-strip, and spiked down.

[ part 4 ]

Wildlife on the Commute: Phidippus audax

Admittedly, my commute these days consists primarily of the walk from the bedroom to the patio.

SVL: Socially Distanced Remote Ops (2)

[ part 1 ]

Tonight was the ops session we have been planning for the last few weeks. Since we are in the middle of a global pandemic, we decided to severely limit on-site attendance, institute social distancing, wearing masks, and try out remote participation.

Instead of the usual 10 - 15 session participants in the layout room, we had only four: A yardmaster for Nowheres, and three engineers. Plus myself for the Internet and streaming stuff. We also had three club members joining us remotely as engineers, as well as a remote dispatcher.

Remote control of our web-based layout panels and locomotives on the layout is easily accomplished using a VPN application that connects remote devices to the club network. EngineDriver's automatic discovery of JMRI's Withrottle Server doesn't work over the VPN connection. Instead, remote participants need to enter IP and port number of the computer running JMRI manually. In our case 192.168.8.10, port 12090. The control and dispatcher web panels are available at http://192.168.8.10:3000 over the VPN connection as well.

Over the course of the afternoon I installed cameras in the layout room. I got two Foscam X1 cameras relatively cheap during a Father's Day sale, and used the IP Webcam app on two Android smartphones as additional IP cameras. All four cameras were streaming video into OBS.

I set up the Foscam X1 with the Foscam phone app: Scan the bar code of the camera, enter wifi information, point camera at phone, add camera to phone app for configuration. I was unable to get the browser interface of the camera to work with Chrome, Firefox, or Safari, but didn't try very hard. In Chrome and Firefox I got and empty page, while with Safari I got at least to the login page, but attempts to login resulted in a failed refresh. I didn't debug this in any depth, and haven't tried with a browser on Windows yet.

The OBS setup is quite simple. For each camera:

• Add Media Source and give it a unique name
• Uncheck "Local File"
• Check "Restart playback when source becomes available"
• Set Network Buffering to 1MB
• Input:
• For the Foscam X1 use rtsp://login:password@192.168.8.XXX:88/subVideo
• For the IP Webcam use http://192.168.8.XXX:8080/video
• Leave Input Format empty
• Click [Ok]

The video feed shows up in the projector window.  Arrange to liking. I'm using the subVideo feed on the Foscam, since I set the OBS projector to 720p and planned to have 4 cameras on the screen. There is no need to stream HD from the camera if the stream gets downscaled to 360p anyways.

I set up the four cameras to cover as much of the layout room as I could pull off, with the intent to give remote operators as much visibility of the main line as possible, so that they get to see the trains they are running.

OBS can stream to Youtube, which I did for a good part of the session, but the more important feature is to make the projector output visible to the remote participants on Google Meet. I planned to use the OBS VirtualCam plugin, but forgot to restart the browser after installing it, so the OBS Virtual Cam option did not show up as possible inputs for video conferencing, which made me sad. I read that Zoom and Skype had disabled virtual cameras in their applications, so I thought maybe Google had done the same (It didn't. It was just my own stupidity).

I used the Google Meet presentation feature to send the camera window to the video conference instead. Worked fine for me, but not for anybody else. There was a random delay on the window capture presentation stream, between 10 - 120 seconds behind real time. This made it impossible for remote engineers to safely run trains, and put quite a damper on the session. Sorry, guys!

The control stand

I spent the evening in front of computers. On the left is the FRS Radio / Meet gateway. This old Dell laptop runs Linux and has separate microphone and head set plugs, with microphones taped to computer and headset speakers. The 17" MacBook Pro in the middle runs OBS and acts as the hub for all the video streams, including broadcasting to Meet and Youtube Live. The 15" MacBook Pro on the right was my control for the Youtube Live stream.

When we do this the next time, I will set up in the dispatchers office, which has a much more comfortable desk area and comfortable chairs.

This was another step to restarting operations at Silicon Valley Lines. Operations sessions as we know them will not be possible for a while. Some remote participation component will be needed for the time begin.

We confirmed that a remote dispatcher with engineers in the layout room is feasible. However, more work is required to reliably set audio levels to avoid clipping, and improve audio quality. At times, engineers in the layout room had trouble hearing dispatcher instructions. Participants on the video conference heard background noise or buzzing that was picked up by the microphone of the FRS gateway computer. These issues should be addressed by replacing the truly analog audio gateway with a circuit that directly connects headset out / microphone in with microphone in / headset out on the radio, taking into account properly adjusting audio levels in both directions.

We need to confirm end-to-end delay of visual feedback through OBS to remote video conference participants is better when using the VirtualCam plug-in.

The club Internet connection has 24 MBit/s downlink and 5 MBit/s uplink. We found that throughput on the uplink was very variable. I stopped the Youtube Live stream halfway through the session after downgrading quality multiple times to free up more bandwidth for Google Meet. That definitely resulted in improved video and audio quality with less artifacts.

IP Webcam did not work reliably on some phones, while it worked just fine on another phone. On problematic phones the app stopped streaming to OBS on a regular basis. Sometimes the app crashed on the phone. I couldn't find a specific root cause for these problems, but noticed that one of the phones I tried got very warm during streaming.

Finally, we need to build a more compelling remote engineer experience. While the camera setup I put together allows for an ok overview of the layout room, it very much has a security camera feel to it. We will try to make it more reliable, but even then it's at best nice as a novelty.

What we really want to do is to put the remote engineer in the middle of the action. If you can't be there, maybe with technology we can provide an experience that is not possible when standing in the layout room.

Stay tuned.

Experiments: FRS Radio Video Conference Gateway

In normal times, Silicon Valley Lines runs one operating session per month. In these times ... not so much. Density of people in the layout room is the main problem with social distancing. Cutting down on the number of people, wearing masks, proper hand santitation, and keeping social distance is a requirement in these times.

What would it take to have a remote dispatcher patched into the FRS radios used by the engineers in the layout room? Video Conferencing solutions like Google Meet, Zoom, Skype, and others bridge the long-distance connection easily. However, how do I connect a FRS radio to a computer?

Should be easy: Connect the headphone speaker of a radio to the microphone in on the laptop, and the line out of the laptop to the microphone of the radio. Not so fast! The voltage levels between line, speaker, and microphone vary quite a bit. It's not just about plugging stuff together with the correct wires, but rather needs some circuitry to translate the signals properly in both directions.

The next idea I had was to connect a headset to the radio, so that I have physically separated places for speaker and microphone, and tape the microphone of a computer headset to the earpiece from the radio, and the computer ear piece to the radio headset microphone. With a headset plugged in the radio automatically goes into VOX mode when turned on. When the radio "hears" something being said, it starts transmitting. There is a delay of 2-3 seconds before radio transmission starts, so people on the "computer" side need to add a couple filler words to all their transmissions. This worked, but volume level from radio back to the computer side was very low and very garbled.

Eventually I found a setup that works reasonably well. I'm using a new cheap ear piece and microphone for the radio side, and regular earbuds for the computer side. The 4-pole 3.5mm jack of the earbuds goes into a splitter cable that converts the wiring to two 3.5mm stereo plugs. The microphone is plugged into a small external denoise adapter and into the computer. I taped the ear piece of the radio side to the microphone of the computer side, and taped the microphone of the radio side to the laptop speaker. The photo above shows the early test setup using a TED talk on Youtube. The volume on the computer needs to be loud enough that the radio starts transmitting, but not so loud that it overwhelms the radio microphone, but with some experimenting the right level was found quickly. A remote dispatcher (or remote engineer) should probably have a microphone close to his month and not use the built-in microphone of their computer.

Participants on the video conference will be able to see the video feed from the layout room and hear the conversation of dispatcher and crews.

I'm still interested in the proper circuitry for connecting the radio directly to the computer, but that's for another time. In addition, at least my Motorola Talkabout radios don't work if they are plugged into a charger, which makes me really sad.

Untergroeningen: Platform (3)

[ Untergroeningen posts ]

[ part 2 ]

Taking a break from rebuilding the tracks on Segment Three I decided tonight to paint the platform on Segment Two. I'm using Woodland Scenics Asphalt Top Coat, which is easy to use and has a very pleasing asphalt color. I find it fascinating how a little bit color can change the scene.

A source of frustration in this area was Track One. At the station building the track is embedded in asphalt. Building track embedded in pavement is always a challenge on Maerklin layouts because the center studs get in the way. I've tried various approaches for this in the past (e.g. the railroad crossing in Emsingen). Here I filled the gaps between the ties with very fine sand, leveled it to the top of the ties, and glued it down like ballast. The Puko-Strip from WeichenWalter sticks up slightly above the ties. I was concerned that the difference in texture would be jarring, and that I couldn't get the top of the center studs properly cleaned after painting. However, cleanup was easy and here's Koef III creeping slowly over the track embedded in asphalt. The texture difference is not as bad as I feared and the center studs are barely visible.

Experimenting

I'm playing with old smart phones as IP webcams, Open Broadcaster Software to stream video to Youtube Live, FRS radio to computer audio, ... This might be going somewhere useful.

A ride up the hill

I finally got over my internal "Schweinehund" today, hopped on the bike, and climbed the hill at Santa Teresa County Park to the gates of IBM. Even at 7:30am it was impressively warm already. After months of being sequestered at home, the climb was a bit harder than I expected, but the downhill ride makes up for the pain.

There's a nice view of Almaden Quicksilver Park and Mt. Umunhum from the small parking lot at the top of the hill.

Untergroeningen: Workbench Chaos

[ Untergroeningen posts ]

Slowly making progress on segment three. Getting there. Piece by piece.

Kurve: Extension Storage case

[ Kurve posts ]

Here's a little finger exercise to get my mind off other things going on in this country. A small box connects the rest of the Kurve module to Slim Staging yard. While I built a storage case for Kurve a while ago, today the extension finally got its respective case. I'm using hardboard with glued and stapled strips of wood. I made the case high enough to leave room for some bushes and small trees on the hill as a transition to the trees on Kurve.

The main motivation for building the case is to protect the scenery from damage and dust while the module is stored in the garage.