Mislabelled

Today I started the day by heading over to the All Gauge Buy and Sell.  There were plenty of sellers, and plenty of buyers.  I saw many NMRA members, even some RMCQ members and some Tuesday Nighters.  I was digging through an NMRA member’s stash of HO cars, and found a model of a vehicle for laying bitumen on the road.  Well that went straight into my collection.  A bargain at $10.  I had a good talk to Bill and Smithy from Toowoomba.  I think I talked Shelton into buying a bit of stuff from their stand.  When I got home, just after lunch I eventually was able to add some wagon number decals to the number boards on my scratch built NOCY wagon. I resolved, my problem where they were disintegrating trying to get them off the backing sheet.

Later that afternoon, I went over to Barnacle Bob’s place.  The plan was to install an Arduino under his layout and have it controlling a blinking Buoy out in the creek mouth and a pesky flashing street light in his main street.  Bob had labelled two wires from each LED and I connected them up to his Arduino.  First up was the marker Buoy.  I connected it up and I could not get it to flash using its 3 second on, 3 seconds off timing sequence.  I reversed the wires and still no luck.  Oh well I connected the street light and we adjusted the input power for the Arduino to 9V and the flashing buoy started to work.  But it seemed to be flickering.  I check the connections and all seemed to be good.  But it was flickering randomly.  I looked at the street light and just as I did, Bob identified that the street light was doing a 3 second on – 3 second off sequence.  He said – "They have been connected up wrong".  I said "Well I think I connected them to what they were labelled as".  So whose problem was this?  So I think it was actually a case of mis-labelling.  So I swapped pins 6 and 13 and Voila!  Both LEDs were now working flawlessly.  The Buoy was operating, protecting the navigational channel and the street light now needs to be reported to the local council office for replacement of the flickering bulb.  Both are working like a bought one.

Tuesday this week we went on a bit of a tour.  Probably the farthest we had travelled for a Tuesday Nighter’s meeting.  We went to Brendan’s place for Tuesday Nighters, not quite at Woop Woop, but you can see it from his place.  This was the first trip out there for more than half the guys.  I think they were impressed by the layout and his unique features in his layout design.  This layout will be a hit when it eventually gets onto the exhibition circuit.

Friday I had planned on doing some modelling, but that got ruined when I took the whole day off and drove my Mother-in-law down the coast and back for a funeral.  It was the husband of one of her cousins and many years back, he was my golfing partner in a social golf club for maybe 10 years.  We got on like a house on fire.  So that wiped out the whole day.  We had a blast catching up with people.

Yesterday I spent some time running the cement train on Cassino from Grafton Yard to Murwillumbah and back.  I also took some photos in case this train makes it to a future issue of AMRM.

Next week I should finish up my NOCY wagon with weathering and add the final pieces to the ballast plough being fine chain and an air tank.