I’ve been working on the layout off and on for the last few weeks. Haven’t taken the time to write a new post because I just feel like I haven’t been getting much done. I’ve been wiring up an new section of track with three turnouts and going back through some of my previous wiring efforts trying to clean them up.
Lately I’ve been feeling like this guy!
I know it’s not as bad as I think it is, I mean, there are a lot of wires involved with DCC, turnouts, accessory decoders, signals, occupancy detectors, facia buttons, and I’m sure I forgot to mention a few! I’ve seen some layout pictures where the wiring looks beautiful, all organized and neat. That ain’t happening here!
This is one of my better efforts, a panel inside the backdrop of my mountain helix. he buss wires from the seven occupancy blocks pass through the coils along the top, upper left is a Towerman and BOD-8 from RR-Cirkits with a breakout board below them to accept input from facia buttons at the three turnouts in this area. The Towerman sends data through a simple serial bus linked to loconet so JMRI knows what is going on.
Upper right are the DCC bus terminal blocks, the lower left is 5V power, and in the middle are accessory decoder/servo controllers for the semaphore and turnout located not too far from the panel. Below is an old computer power supply I am using for 5V and 12v power. On the front is mounted terminal strips and then along the wall I’m adding terminal blocks fed from it.
Below is shown two turnout decoders along with wiring for two blocks. It’s a mess, but it works!
