A Positive Weekend

So on Friday afternoon I could not get motivated to do anything.  Maybe some of that was because my daughter was not feel well on Wednesday night/ Thursday morning.  She went for a Covid test on Thursday morning and we thought we could be in lock down for a week.  

On Saturday morning we got the answer and she was negative.  A big relief.  No one else in the house had any symptoms.  I was experimenting about how to install a single LED into my ambulance.  I was trying fibre optics, (well fishing line) but I was not getting a good light out the top.  So I decided that I would just mount the LED straight up inside the ambulance.

I was contemplating how to put two LED lights into my fire engine.  Again it turned out that I needed to disassemble it and drill some holes for the LEDs and the wires up through the cab and place them next to the blue lights on the roof.  When testing these at the workbench they seemed to work OK.

So on Saturday afternoon I decided to go to the shed and install my Arduino for drill the holes up through the baseboard for my disco lights in my community hall.  So I drilled those holes, pushed the wires up thought the baseboard and then through the community hall.  I turned the Arduino on and the hall was really bopping along.  A future task is to add the MP3 player so we have sound as well.

So the next task was to run wires from the Arduino to the fire engine on the layout.  These were run and then the wires were run to the ambulance.  The holes through the baseboard were drilled and the wires fed through the holes and soldered up to the fire engine and the ambulance.  These were tested and seemed to work OK with a 3V power supply.

Work then resumed back at the computer merging two Arduino programs into one.  I merged the code for the Disco event at the hall to the flashing light program and there was no issues.  No compile errors at all.  My skills must be coming back. I ran the program and there was a slight issue with the flash rate.  I made a change in two places and re-tested and all was good.  

Late on Saturday night I realised that back on the layout I was delivering the wrong polarity to one side of the flashing lights were delivering to the ambulance, fire engine and police car.  I also realised that I had not installed my inline resistor to the various flashing lights in the cars.  That was my problem sitting at the kitchen table doing some testing on Saturday morning.  I blew up two small red LEDs, on a 3 V power supply.  So I devised my work schedule for Sunday for when I got down to the shed.

So early on Sunday I steadily went through my list of tasks.  I rewired my flashing lights to be a common 5 V instead of GND.  I then added the resistors to the circuits. I swapped the Arduino I had on the layout, for one with the new program in it that had both the Disco code and the flash light code for the emergency vehicles.  I turned the Arduino on and the disco raged away.  But my flashing lights did not flash.  It had me perplexed for about 15 seconds, until I saw that the plugs for the ambulance and the fire engine were just dangling down in front of me, and not plugged into the Arduino.  Well that was a bit of a problem!  But very easily fixed.  So I did and guess what?  They worked!

So later on I was looking at how to remove my existing police car from the layout - it had various wires running into it.  It had headlight and taillights that worked and and flashers on the roof that did not work.  I through I had blown the flashing LED lights a couple of years ago and needed to work out how to remove them from the car on the layout keeping the other wires and lights in tact.  This was done and the flashers were taken to the work bench to determine how to add new LED lights to the car.  I just happened to test the old flashing lights and wouldn’t you know.  They actually flashed.  It must have been a dry solder joint that was causing it not to flash.  So these were old flashing lights were returned to the old police car and now that is working fine. 

So I then had to dig around and find another car that I could add my own Arduino powered flashing lights to.  The car was found, disassembled, and provision for lights made.  However, this old car, already had front and rear lights.  But these were not working.  So I have been distracted by trying to get these lights to work.  Tonight I think I will make an executive decision and throw that car away and grab another car from the layout and drill some more holes in it for the my flashers, but I will check that the headlight and tail lights work first.