New Layout: Electrics

My evenings seem to be taken up with soldering, lots of soldering.

First PCB to be constructed is for the first board, this comprises capacitor discharge for two points, track isolation for the two points (as Dublo points aren't electrically isolated) and turntable control - the relay & diodes of which were reclaimed from the small control PCB that I built ages ago for the turntable.

After many more nights of soldering and making lots of mistakes (ie having the layout map upside down) I've finished all the PCBs for the layout.

This little lot needs to be fitted throughout the front three boards...

The shuttle control is still in its bag and the signal matrix control was purchased a few years ago. The rest is self-built.

The eight relay bank is for the track isolation controls within the four tracks of the station. Elaborate but allows easy connection and disconnection of locos & multiple units etc.

I have to confess that the smaller, two capacitor PCB on the left was actually the first PCB that I produced for board one but sadly I didn't buy bread board large enough to accommodate the second bank of terminal connectors and the large capacitors. For board three there are only two pairs of points and track isolation is not needed so I de-soldered the second bank of terminal blocks and soldered in the capacitors. In reality I probably could have produced a completely new PCB from scratch quicker than it's taken me to re-hash this one but I don't like seeing things go to waste!

I've tested everything as far as possible using my multi-meter to ensure that there are no dry joints, so far so good. Now to test the capacitors using a pair of points.

The idea of using home-made PCBs is that this should make wiring the boards much simpler. On the old layout, the switches were mounted in the boards with individual wires and capacitors all over the place. One stray wire could take ages to locate. This makes the whole process a lot simpler and should (hopefully) make fault detection much easier, plus I have circuit diagrams to refer back to - previously I've done everything by memory, the result being that each board ended up being wired differently with different colour combinations used for the points wiring. Everything across this layout will be standardised.

Much easier.