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Phase III expansion is on the way - this will be the place to watch it happen!


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Logos and Lettering

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 Getting back into the swing and moving some things forward. One of those projects that I have been looking forward to is customizing a couple private railroad operations. One is the Ojitas Mine Railroad, which provides a fair amount of traffic for the layout. This takes cars from a short hidden staging location to interchange at Rosita. I plan to have the Ojitas RR own a few 70 Tonners and a caboose or two. Ojitas means "small eyes" in Spanish, so I set about looking for a suitable logo. A few google searches turned up a plethora of options. I settled on one, albeit it was in multiple colors. Not being one that wanted to spend much on decals, I used some color manipulation software to create a pure black and white image. I kinda like how it turned out. Pulls in the "ojitas" concept while carrying the idea of a rugged southwest mining operation. And simple enough to suggest a cheap corporate look. The other operation is the newly completed Halcon Cement plant. Not a...
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LCC and Wiring Continues

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Slower than desired, but better to do it right now than try to fiddle it in later.... In my last staging yard, I never did install feeders.  Instead I just counted on the continuity of the turnouts to carry power to each of the 16 staging tracks.  Bad idea.  ~Most~ stayed powered up over the 10 or so years it operated.  ~Some~ randomly dropped out... necessitating fishing and soldering wires onto tracks with 7" spacing between decks.  Not uber-fun at all. SO... with GNW Phase 3, I promised myself ALL track would have feeders every 6' (one feeder per 2 sticks of flex), plus additional feeders in any other complex areas such as yard throats.  This would also allow me to have every other stick of flex not have to be soldered at the track jointers, allowing for expansion and contraction of the benchwork.  BUT... this comes at a cost.  Instead of 16 single ended tracks, I elected to have a 9-track staging yard, each track capable of holding 3 tra...
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LCC - Configuring a Push Button ~WITH~ Indication

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A few months ago there was a post on the LCC Groups.IO forum talking about the ability for one of the LCC node I/O points to both act as an INPUT, that is, to accept a push button command, AND act as an output, such as to illuminate an indicating light.  This is super cool!  Why?  Well at an all-in cost of around $3 per I/O point, it's hard to justify a lot of indicating lights on panels.  BUT... if we can get a "free" output for each discrete input, well, that is just like having your cake and eating it too!  (Never totally understood that analogy, but seems fitting.) The way this works is the node runs the I/O point as an output for 63 milliseconds, and then for a few milliseconds, it converts the output to an input where it polls the input.  So if it detects a "low" or a "high" in this window, it creates the appropriate event.  Slick, huh?  Timing at 63 ms is fast enough that even if the PB is just momentarily touched, it is enough to trigger...
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