Battery Pack all finished and mounted. Plenty of room. I’ve decided to go ahead and wire up everything since I have the thing torn apart like this. I’ll be adding a Wixel that will be able to share control with the 2.4Ghz radio via a Pololu R/C multiplexor. I’m also planning on adding a set of Kadee Couplers controlled by a microservo. The final touch will be a Sparkfun ID-20 RFID reader which will interface with the onboard Wixel. By placing tags around the layout, this will let the locomotive know where he is in real-time.
Sound card is working, now have sounds playing via radio control but I need to revise the clips and control algorithms. The amplifier/mixer is also still in the construction phase, these boards do drive a headset quite well, but don’t have the power to drive the speaker in the locomotive. Plus, just wiring the output of the two boards together works ok for debugging purposes but you get a drop in db when both are playing so that needs to be evened out. Nevertheless, the sound is quite good, I’ve been running it through my sound system here and it has the dog looking around for the train when I trigger the airhorns 🙂