Doing a little running outside today, it was a nice day. My layout is a bit thin, needs some ballast and maintenance, it’s been a tough weather season this year, I have not kept up.
So here are the insides. I like that it’s all self contained, no track power- 3000mah LiPo prime mover, the 5A power amplifier with the big heatsink drives the TCSWow. (You can’t see it here, its underneath the Xbee Receiver)
My receiver board has a standard Xbee sort of foot print for the network chip, it’s what I originally designed it for. Lately I have had a Bluetooth compatible radio chip in it so I could drive my trains with my Android Phone. I swapped that out with an Xbee Series 1 so it would get the Protothrottle network traffic. I coded up some new firmware for the receiver and flashed it into my USAT PRR GP9. Worked really well. I think I have most of the bugs worked out, just needs a bit of tweaking.
I changed the brake on the protothrottle to ‘pulsed’ on F7 for the TCSWow and it works great. I love that brake squeal. I still have lots to do here, the decoder is still ‘out of the box’ I have not tweaked it much at all. I want to configure it with my smart phone, I don’t like the ‘audio assist’ thing much- I have some of that code built out but it will take a while to get it going.