Bernhards Random Ramblings BACKUP

I purchased this Accurail kit several years ago on another business trip that included a stop a Eastside Trains in Kirkland, WA. There were several versions of this wood reefer on the shelf, decorated mostly for PFE, MDT, and other well-known carriers. I didn't want to renumber the car, so I got one I knew wasn't on the club layout.  Here's the car body straight out of the box. I started with the underframe and applied washes of rust, dirt, and railroad tie brown. I generally just dip the brush into the color, and thin the color in a drop or two of water. That's enough for one pass. While the blotches of color and brush marks look quite terrible at first, after several applications, the blotches combine to translucent layers and create a very nice and natural color effect. At the very end, I apply a thin dusting of Pan Pastels Raw Umber Shade to pull everything together. For the metal roof I started with a wash of light rust, focused on the ribs and crevices. When that ...

RBWX 79248 painted and weathered, but I skipped all further detailing I've never built an Accurail car before. Why would I want to build a car if there are many finely detailed ready-to-run cars available? And why build one that won't even run on my railroad? I picked up this kit on a business trip  last year -- in the olden days before the pandemic -- along with the Bowser cars I wrote about before . The club requires metal wheel sets, so I ordered Intermountain wheel sets to replace the plastic wheel sets that came with the kit, and I should replace the plastic couplers with the respective Kadee couplers (looks like #148 is the right one).  The car body is preformed, and the plug door needs to be installed. I wanted to the body to be closed, because otherwise I'd need to find a solution for hiding the weight that runs the length of the car. I popped off the roof walk when I toyed around with the kit in February and haven't touched the kit since. It bothered me that th...

One of my projects today: I'm finally building a LocoNet cable tester. This is a design created for FREMO . While putting the kit together, I watched more footage from yesterday's NMRAx event . There isn't a whole lot of space on the circuit board, and orientation of a couple parts is not obvious from the board, so it's important to follow the instructions carefully. I hot-glued the LocoNet sockets into the box and added more screws for additional stability. I also used the opportunity to build LocoNet boxes by HOfine . These are commonly used at FREMO modular meets for plugin throttles. I put the cable tester to good use on the boxes.

My workbench has been an unmitigated disaster for many months now. Half-finished, started, abandoned, and stalled projects were piling up and collecting dust in a corner of our dining room. I'm truly thankful that my wife hasn't put me in the dog house yet. With the Silicon Valley Lines events wrapped up for the year and a holiday week coming up, this weekend was a good opportunity to clean ship. I threw out what I no longer needed, sorted and packed away what I don't need right now, and organized projects for the near future. The following might make an appearance on this blog soon: FREMO LocoNet boxes and LocoNet cable tester. Weathering the two RSD5 for Silicon Valley Lines. Two Accurail car kits and three Bowser car kits. I showed some of these before . A livestock car kit from RST Modellbau. Here's the cleaned up and organized workbench. Let's see how long I'll manage to keep it this neat.

Remotely controlled train 4837 entering Kaos Jct on a green signal The Silicon Valley Lines Fall Open House is in the box. I had a lot of fun, but as such events go, it was also stressful. The video-enabled Webthrottle worked well for remote visitors, once we got over a major mistake I made when sending the throttle URLs to the first visitor group. After that I got more into a rhythm: Send emails with personalized throttle links to confirmed visitors, have them join on the video conference, give introduction talk, hand off to train master, and while the session is running work on the next batch of emails. At the Audio/Video control stand preparing email notifications for the next session (Photo Credit : Josh) We had planned for running a round-trip session every 20 minutes. That was a bit too aggressive, since it takes a train about 15 minutes to drive the Open House loop. We had pre-staged trains around the layout, so 3 visitors could start with running their train right away. However...

Back in September, as we were gearing up for another full-blown socially-distanced ops session at Silicon Valley Lines, I quickly needed to build another camera car. I had already built a supplementary power supply for James' Dash9 dummy locomotive using a well car and a 10,000 mAh USB power bank. I wanted a self-contained camera car, so I decided to build a cradle for the second power bank I had, and mount the camera on the side of the power bank. That setup became Cam3. This worked, and we used the car in ops sessions since. However, over time it became obvious that for some reason this car had worse wifi reception than Cam4, my original camera design. That's very curious since it's basically the same hardware ... with two exceptions: Cam4 is powered with a JuiceBoxZero connected to a Li-Ion battery, and Cam3 hugs a big hunk of metal. Side by side comparisons showed that Cam3 performed clearly worse than Cam4, even after reducing the network data requirements of the video...

  Last Friday I went to the club layout and tested the Web Throttle code. The code worked, but video quality was terrible. As soon as I tried to get two video feeds off the camera to WebThrottle and OBS respectively, the video streams produced only one image every 10 seconds at best. That's clearly not acceptable for what we are trying to do here. I experimented with camera settings over the weekend at home. My theory was that due to the difficult Wifi conditions in the layout room, we're simply not getting the network throughput we need to get stable video streams. When running two streams at home I found that the PiZero kept a network send queue of more than two Megabyte or more, i.e. mjpg_streamer is stuffing bytes into the network queue, but they are not making it off the device fast enough. Eventually, buffers will overflow, the network code backs off, the queue drains out, and we see skipped video. In tunnel sections on the Welztalbahn, the queue dropped to about one Mega...

Today was last week's hike in reverse. We drove to the top of Mt. Umunhum, car-pooled to the Bald Mountain parking lot and hiked back up to the top. A nice hike, not too tough, and good views, despite the low clouds. The cube is fascinating, even on the second visit. 

In preparation for the upcoming Virtual Open House at Silicon Valley Lines, I have been toying with the JMRI Web Throttle code to integrate a video view. I also somewhat limited Web Throttle functionality to meet the needs of the Open House setup. It's not perfect, but seems to work reasonably well on the Welztalbahn. The real test will be Friday evening, when I'll try this out at the club. Contrary to the earlier tests I did , this version's video link URL and locomotive name are set dynamically in JMRI, so that it works correctly even for remote operators out on the Internet.