Bernhards Random Ramblings BACKUP

For the first time in months, I was able to participate in an ops session at Silicon Valley Lines in person again. This was a nice opportunity to catch up with other club members and enjoy the atmosphere of being in the layout room. I ran Bayshore Yard, which was a very relaxed assignment with plenty of opportunities to railfan trains run by remote operators.

CabCams tested and ready to go With Santa Clara County back in Red Tier we started to plan for an end of the month remote ops session. This week the county upgraded to Orange Tier and California announced availability of vaccinations for everyone in April, so things are definitely improving with regard to the pandemic. This month's Ops was for club members, and became sort of a shake-down session. The layout hadn't run since the November Open House , and we wanted to try out using Zello Personal instead of FRS radios to facilitate remote operator communications with Dispatch and Yards, including the ability to have multiple sub-channels for focused communication. Extra 200 is staged in Dodge Siding for a trip to Tracy Somewhat to my surprise, we had a lot of problems with Zello. The app is very slick, and easy to use. It does project the feeling of being on a radio link, which I think adds to the realism of communication. However, multiple participants reported problems with a ...

I have regularly attended the Layout Design / Operations SIG Weekend for years, met lots of great people, and saw fantastic layouts around the larger Bay Area. Contrary to previous events , and in line with the theme of the last 12 months, this year the event went fully virtual, so while I miss meeting with others in person, I do get to enjoy at least part of the event from the comfort of our patio. Tomorrow (Sunday) at noon I will participate in the layout owner panel representing Silicon Valley Lines.

Silicon Valley Lines ran another operations session with remote operators and a socially distanced skeleton crew in the layout room. This time around the technology worked smoothly. The upgraded Internet connection performed well and we had sufficient bandwidth to run video conference sessions and Youtube Live stream in parallel. The screenshot above shows the cab view perspectives from passenger train 18 in Igo controlled by a club member in the UK as its getting passed by passenger train 111. High priority train 104 is holding in Jacksonville for train 18 to get moving again. Meanwhile train 102 is ready to depart in Windsor pending assignment of a remote operator.  Two local operators took care of switching assignments. An on-site brakeman worked with remote operators to assist with easy switching chores, or if there were derailments. The Nowheres Yardmaster set up or broke down trains. I worked the A/V job and helped out with brakeman duties as necessary. I spent most of the ev...

A week ago I showed an actual prototype Zugschlusssignal ("end of train signal"). Here's the HO version attached to a short train leaving Emsingen. The effect is very subtle, but significantly increases realism. Making these is an extremely fiddly task. I hope to get better at it with more practice. The etching is from digitalzentrale.de . The etched parts need to be folded and painted. To mount on a car, the part merely gets hung over the buffers and pushed towards the car body. That makes the mount pretty much disappears from view as it lines up with the black running gear of the car. Painting the red and white signal cleanly is difficult. Even though the signal has etched paint guides and I'm using a toothpick instead of a brush, my painting accuracy needs more work. There's plenty of opportunity to practice: I have 20 parts, with 2 signals each, front and back, so I'll need to paint 80 signals... I should have ordered the decal sheet.

I'm toying with integrating a video view into the JMRI Web Throttle. This is currently very much a proof of concept. After an evening of messing with JavaScript, which I haven't done in many years, it's working reasonably well. The throttle pane is the box on the left (or on the right, depending on personal preferences). The video window is in the middle under the function buttons. The function buttons are basically useless for a remote operator. You can't see the locomotive and you can't hear it either. The idea is to use this interface for remote operations in situations where I want to limit which locomotives remote operators are able to control, e.g. in a Virtual Open House setup. This is to limit potential abuse by visitors from the Internet, where it is easy to hide. Since it is difficult to kick people off a public Web site without shutting it down for everyone, I'd like to avoid giving people full control of the layout through the Withrottle API. The Web...

The Zugschlusssignal ("end of train signal") must be mounted at the end of the last car of a train. It is made from metal and there are usually two such markers at the end of the train. Station agents and operators along the tracks observe passing trains and note the complete passing once they see the Zugschlusssignal. This marker is commonly used on freight trains, while passenger cars usually have lighted red end of train markers. Wouldn't it be interesting to include proper placement of such signal in the operations scheme of our model railroads? 

After the arrival of Dg 6946 in Horb (active staging) the local switcher is sorting cars   Among many other things, over the last few weeks I worked out an operations plan for the Welztalbahn with the modular extension. Tonight I tested out the first part of that hampered by many technical issues. I need to operate the layout more often and more regularly.

Today Dave Falkenburg and I presented a clinic on "Remote Operations at Silicon Valley Lines" at the NMRAx Virtual Convention. The session was live-streamed on Facebook and Youtube . Regular readers of this blog will recognize some of the content of the presentation. There's plenty of new content as well, so I hope it was interesting in either case. Here is the raw recording of the presentation of today's NMRAx linked to the beginning of our talk.

I've been waiting for a couple weeks now to be able to write this post. John Abatecola from TSG multimedia visited Silicon Valley Lines in August and filmed segments for this video before and during an operations session at Silicon Valley Lines. I explain various aspects of how we add remote operators into operating sessions at SVL, including an overview of the hardware, software, and systems setup, as well as pitfalls. This allows us to minimize the number of people in the layout room to enable social distancing.

I've decided to build a second camera car for Silicon Valley Lines Ops sessions, so that we have a spare camera in case there are problems. For this one I wanted to try and use the existing USB battery holder I built last month and mount the Raspberry Pi on the side of the battery. I tacked the Raspberry Pi Zero to a thin sheet of styrene that can slide between the battery and the styrene supports. I built a support structure for the camera that's glued to the styrene sheet the Pi sits on, and fits between battery and car side. Then I carefully twisted and bent the camera cable to make a 90 degree turn so that it it oriented correctly. I could turn the image in software, but prefer to go with physically correct orientation from the start if possible. After taking the photos below, I added another styrene sheet to protect the camera cable from bumps. This setup must be placed in a container well car because it is quite high and completely fills out the modern HO loading gauge. I...

  Another socially distanced ops session at Silicon Valley Lines. Most of the engineers participated from home using our cab view camera cars, and there was only a skeleton crew in the layout room so that we can socially distance properly.  The Dash-9 dummy unit leading train 215-1 has a camera in the nose, but only a very small battery, so we set it up to continuously charge the locomotive battery from a regular USB battery bank mounted in a well car. All our tunnels are sized for double stack container trains. The battery pack in the well car is slightly higher than that, but fits everywhere. Sometimes with less than a quarter inch of space to spare ... I spent the day mostly in front of a screen tending to Internet, cameras, and remote engineers. I tried to play with the settings so that we could live stream the session to Youtube. However, I couldn't get a stable stream out, as the video conference with engineers, video processing of incoming streams, and recording the ses...

[ CabCam posts ] When mounting a camera on a flat car for layout videos or remote operators, a common approach is to set the camera close to the front of the flat car, since we want to give the illusion of being in a locomotive cab. Seeing the front of the flat car destroys that illusion. However, doing this has an unfortunate side-effect: Depending on the length of the flat car used viewers now complain that they can't see as much of the scenery along the track as they had hoped. Especially in tighter curves there is a distinct lack of scenery visible on the inside of the curve. The camera doesn't "look around the corner". Part of the reason for this is basic geometry: The car rides on a curve. The center of the camera view is on a tangent off the center of the curved track. Hence, the center line of the camera image and the center line of the track diverge. The tighter the curve, the larger the divergence, the more scenery on the outside of the curve is taking up s...

[ CabCam posts ] For tonight's club meeting I brought the camera to the layout, so that we could test more of the applicability of this on the actual layout. It worked well. Here is James running the train on the layout from his home in the Santa Cruz Mountains. The camera opens up new perspectives for ops. Here's a screenshot taken by another member participating in the video conference. This time I set up in a much more comfortable location in the layout room.

[ CabCam posts ] We're still tuning the software and streaming setup, but the hardware looks feasible. This is a Raspberry Pi Zero W with the Zero Spy Cam and a Juicebox Zero battery board connected to a 2000mAh Li-Ion battery. A completely self-contained camera setup that easily fits on a HO flat car and can stream video over existing Wifi. If I stack the components more intelligently, it fits on a much shorter car, too. During the Show&Tell at tonight's club meeting, we demonstrated the setup at the workbench and on the Welztalbahn. Members on the video conference were able to observe the trip with only a few seconds delay. This worked much better than expected. So far, so good. The real test will be trying this out at the club.

[ part 1 ] Tonight was the ops session we have been planning for the last few weeks. Since we are in the middle of a global pandemic, we decided to severely limit on-site attendance, institute social distancing, wearing masks, and try out remote participation. Instead of the usual 10 - 15 session participants in the layout room, we had only four: A yardmaster for Nowheres, and three engineers. Plus myself for the Internet and streaming stuff. We also had three club members joining us remotely as engineers, as well as a remote dispatcher. Remote control of our web-based layout panels and locomotives on the layout is easily accomplished using a VPN application that connects remote devices to the club network. EngineDriver's automatic discovery of JMRI's Withrottle Server doesn't work over the VPN connection. Instead, remote participants need to enter IP and port number of the computer running JMRI manually. In our case 192.168.8.10, port 12090. The control and dispatcher web...

Due to social distancing guidelines still in effect, Silicon Valley Lines canceled the May ops session originally scheduled for tonight. We discussed doing another remote ops session instead, and decided that this time we'd try to do a session from the club. This was to test both our ability to implement social distancing, as well as whether and how to incorporate remote operators into an operations scheme. Another goal tonight was to stress-test the club's Internet connection with multiple video streams in a multi-user setting. We set up various cameras to record the action from different angles. We also moved the cameras around to capture trains as they moved from yards over the layout to their destinations for switching. The verdict: Over the course of the evening we ran a whopping four trains, instead of the 25 trains we normally run. We can easily support a remote dispatcher and give remote operators control of a train. We have the technology to do that. However, our Inte...

John Abatecola from TSG Multimedia produced a great video introduction to how operations with DTC works. Not only is this video really well done, but also shows how much fun we are having at the cllub during operating sessions.

John Abatecola from TSG Multimedia joined the Silicon Valley Lines meeting last week where we ran a virtual ops session on the Untergroeningen modules. To my surprise, John mentions the session in his monthly podcast released today and briefly discusses his perspective on our event. The video above is deep-linked to start right before that. TSG Multimedia has a lot of model railroad related videos on Youtube, and I like how John keeps creating new and engaging content.

[ Untergroeningen posts ] After the very successful remote ops session with SVL club members yesterday, I ran a couple more trains in Untergroeningen to exercise tracks and turnouts. I also set up the lighting system for a stress test and had everything on all day long. Tatjana switched one session by herself and apparently had fun, too. I used mostly the new Brawa BR212 in the Digital Extra version (#42863). This engine is a superb runner and the sounds are top-notch. The motor sounds just right, and the brake squeal is perfect. The locomotive comes with some fun features like motorized cooling fan that spins when the fan sounds come on, as well as remotely controlled couplers. The sound volume is too loud out of the box, but overall I'm very impressed with this engine. I turned off the lights in the living room tonight, which dramatically enhances the shadow box effect of the layout. I can't wait to add trees and bushes in the background to get more texture. The stress test...