Bernhards Random Ramblings BACKUP

Following this recipe Tatjana found for me I made Stuffed Bell Peppers for dinner tonight. They came out much better than I had hoped for. The kids were pleased.

  I made another apple cake while watching OpSIG's Second Section this afternoon. Cake came out good and will serve us well for the first half of the week.

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...

I'm participating in a TSG multimedia virtual crew lounge discussion tomorrow afternoon at 4pm PDT. I'm planning to join from the Welztalbahn layout room. Camera, laptop, and props are in place. Looking forward to an interesting discussion. Update 20/Sept/2020: With the extra light I put on top of the garage cabinet it was getting toasty in the layout room. I very much enjoyed the discussion with the other panelists. 

Dinner tonight turned out much better than I expected.