Ground work

Doing digging and thinking, I need to decide what I want to be doing with electronics.

Being a software engineer during the day encourages something for or using computers. Lots of cheap microcontrollers available now days, so that's a good fit. Plus, over the years, I've had an on and off interest in model railroading, but never wanted to use up that much space and my artistic skills are lacking.

Then there is my hand, my father-in-law. He's always been into railroading and is currently building himself a brand new layout within a restricted budget and questionable electronics skills. So I popped on over to his place to see how he's doing. I admired his layout and chatted with him for a while. Turns out that he already has several specific needs and wasn't sure how to address them.

He's currently using traditional straight DC for testing and showing off his layout, and plans to switch to a DCC system for the locomotives in the future, but can't go to DCC for his switch outs at this time, but might in the future. He'll be using a mix of solenoid/snap and tortoise switches he's been collecting over the years and was worried he may have damaged a couple tortoise switches because he found out that his power packs weren't putting out the proper voltages. To make things more complicated, the snap style switches and tortoise slow-mo switches use different type of wiring and actuation. Mess it up in installation or usage and it either doesn't work or you can burn out the solenoids in the snap switches. Small things like either using a momentary contact switch vs. a regular toggle make a big difference.

He also redesigned a portion of his layout and needs an emergency collision avoidance emergency cutoff in one portion of his track (he already had one collision when he was running two trains at 'similar' speeds and got distracted). Then there's other little things, like wall warts being used to power what lighting he has in place that are running hot. That's an accident waiting to happen.

One more thing, parts. He's not very internet savy, can't spend a whole lot, doesn't know a lot about some of the specs he's dealing with. He's the type of person that used to keep Radio Shack parts area busy. He was even upset when he needed something as simple as some barrier strip terminal blocks and discovered that Radio Shack isn't a place to go to any more.

Checking if he damaged anything is scheduled for my next visit along with some catalog, we ended up running out of time before we finished, how time flies.

Looks like we have a fit for matching skills and interests to actually be able to make something useful.