Underground station design at ekikabe.net

[cteno4]

yeah especially  you were the one who found sakatsu! 😜

 

jeff

[gavino200]

17 hours ago, Madsing said:

 

Yes. Kobaru MB-07 Planoita · Concrete wall. Main unit price ¥ 600 (tax included ¥ 648). Release date November 2014. Plastic material imitating the walls of concrete. It is ideal for building outer walls, retaining walls, bridge piers etc. Material: PS, size: 84 x 120 mm 3 pieces.

Unfortunately out of production...

 

I actually have a couple of sheets of these from before Kobaru went belly-up. I figured they'd look good when painted but I never thought they could look that good. That's a really nice concrete effect. 

[gavino200]

16 hours ago, cteno4 said:

Looks like sakatsu is making it now!

 

https://shopsakatsu.com/shopdetail/000000010581/ct254/page1/order/

 

im tempted to do an order from sakatsu here!

 

jeff

 

I made a big-ish purchase from them recently. I'm looking forward to receiving it!

[gavino200]

17 hours ago, Madsing said:

 

It's a break-out board that I made myself. Designing and manufacturing a PCB is easy and cheap these days. These are the highlights of this project:

- DCC input. I used the DCC Decoder library from Mynabay (http://www.mynabay.com/dcc_monitor/).

- Driving railroad signals using DCC is difficult (it's my opinion only). There seems to be many ways to achieve that, so I picked one supported by Rocrail, analyzed the DCC packets generated by the Z21 and wrote the corresponding Arduino software.

- I reversed engineered the Tomix signals (they are smart, just using 4 pins for any number of aspects)

- I designed a circuit to drive them (actually, you just need the Arduino, six transistors and a few resistors)

- I used Charlieplexing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlieplexing) to be able to connect up to ten signals to a single Arduino Nano. Programming that was the most difficult part.

- The Arduino software currently supports up to five aspects (Japanese style signals, of course). But I have not been able to figure out yet how to control them all using DCC (the current limit is three: green, yellow and red).

I can share everything if you are interested (I should start a different thread about this project), but it's still pretty much work in progress (well, you know that already 😀) .

 

Marc

 

I'm definitely interested. I'll have to study the project to see if I'm ready for it. If not, I'll probably wire the signals into my layout and complete the electronics when my knowledge level has increased. 

 

I'm curious, what's your tech background? Have you learned all this through modelling? It's very impressive!

[cteno4]

5 hours ago, gavino200 said:

 

I made a big-ish purchase from them recently. I'm looking forward to receiving it!

so how did it work on checkout? I tried but it only gave Japanese delivery or pickup for the shipping options. What shipping do they do, was it reasonably priced? Or did you just email them an order?

 

jeff

[gavino200]

16 minutes ago, cteno4 said:

so how did it work on checkout? I tried but it only gave Japanese delivery or pickup for the shipping options. What shipping do they do, was it reasonably priced? Or did you just email them an order?

 

jeff

 

I just ignored that stuff and made my order on the website. They emailed me the next day with a summary and a shipping quote 1149 yen for "International shipping". No clue what that is. Hopefully it's the SAL slow boat. But I have no idea. I don't really care as long as it eventually gets here. I'll let you know when it arrives. They were super polite and fast (of course). 

 

[cteno4]

Cool so you just put in a credit card and paid?

 

I sent them an email yesterday to ask how they want to handle international orders.

 

jeff

[gavino200]

10 minutes ago, cteno4 said:

Cool so you just put in a credit card and paid?

 

I sent them an email yesterday to ask how they want to handle international orders.

 

jeff

 

Yep. 

[Madsing]

7 hours ago, gavino200 said:

I'm definitely interested. I'll have to study the project to see if I'm ready for it. If not, I'll probably wire the signals into my layout and complete the electronics when my knowledge level has increased. 

 

I'm curious, what's your tech background? Have you learned all this through modelling? It's very impressive!

 

If there is none, let's start a separate thread about signals. There is a lot to share...

 

I am an electronics engineer, did a lot of embedded electronic and software design in the 90's, now happy to do it again as a hobby! I am very new to railroad modelling, though. I started my layout 6 years ago and it instantly became a real passion 😀

Although I don't do it naturally, I am very happy to share and exchange ideas, and I'm also very impressed by your new layout (and a bit jealous of the space you have in your "train room" 😀)

[gavino200]

1 hour ago, Madsing said:

 

If there is none, let's start a separate thread about signals. There is a lot to share...

 

I'll look into what the Digikeijs unit can do tommorrow maybe. I almost hope there's a good reason to go the arduino route. I really get a kick out of it. It's very interesting to me. 

 

1 hour ago, Madsing said:

 

I am an electronics engineer, did a lot of embedded electronic and software design in the 90's, now happy to do it again as a hobby!

 

That's great. Excellent skills to have. I matriculated into engineering straight out of high school, but dropped out after a few weeks and transferred into philosophy. I was a mixed up kid with lots of questions. 🤪 But I've always been fascinated by tinkering with things and finding out how things work.

 

1 hour ago, Madsing said:

 

I am very new to railroad modelling, though. I started my layout 6 years ago and it instantly became a real passion 😀

 

From what you've achieved I had guessed you'd been doing it all your life. That's a lot of skill to build in 6 years. I started doing the trains with my son. But for the last couple of years it's been clear that it's my hobby and not his. He's all about memes and video games these days.

 

1 hour ago, Madsing said:

Although I don't do it naturally, I am very happy to share and exchange ideas, and I'm also very impressed by your new layout (and a bit jealous of the space you have in your "train room" 😀)

 

Thanks. Just publishing your ideas on yukari has been a huge help. I'm trying to learn as much myself but every bit of help is welcome. Yes, the space I have is a real luxury. But on the other hand, I really like fine detail, so it's going to take me decades to model that space. It's going to be mostly unmodeled track for a long time. I sometimes wonder what on earth I was thinking making it that big. 🤣

[gavino200]

I read through the manual for the Digikeijs Signalling/switching module. Basically it's a function decoder that connects to the track output (or via loconet by a trick popularized here by @chadbag). 

 

It costs $50 and can handle 8 turnouts, 8 two light signals, or four complex (four light or more) signals. I could use these for my signals. One unit for four signals is going to call for a ton of these things, though. And it's definitely not as much fun as the arduinos. 

 

I'm leaning toward trying the Arduino route and using the Digikeijs solution if I can't get the arduino method to work. 

 

I'm also thinking that if I can control signals with arduinos, I should also be able to use them to control my turnouts. My logic being that if the same Digikeijs unit does both, then.......etc

 

 

 

 

 

These images are from my Digikeijs DR4018 manual as downloaded from this site. Page 28 and 29

 

https://support.digikeijs.com/hc/en-us/articles/360001082737-DR4018-Manuals  

 

 

My first task, which I'm ready to do, is to buy some signals. I think I'll do that over the next few days. 

 

[Madsing]

I have decided to model my underground station after F12 副都心線 東新宿駅 (https://ekikabe.net/f12) so this weekend I started to work on the graphics. I have used Affinity Photo to correct the perspective of a photo of the flower pattern decorating the walls of the station. Then I have used Affinity Designer to draw the flowers on top of the photo. I now have a nice vector image of the pattern that I can use, scale and print at any resolution.