 Hi, I'm Ray. And I'm Ashley. And February's What's Neat starts right now. The What's Neat Show is sponsored by Lombard Hobbies, your value hobby shop for over 40 years of modelers helping modelers. Big inventory, value pricing, fast shipping and great service. This is What's Neat for February 2021. I'm your host Ken Patterson and this month we have a father and son team, Austin and Steve Allard share with us their brand new layout that they've spent the last six months building. This is a double deck layout designed to run long trains and it's really neat to see their fit and finish that they've got prior to scenery on this layout. Also this month, James Regear shares with us how to build a four beacon Stratolite beacon for his HO scale locomotives. This is just like the beacon that we've seen Rapido come out with in their model whereas there's four separate bulbs that flash and create that rotating effect that we see on the prototype. It's really interesting to watch James Regear show us how to write code and make it seem very simple to have the end result that we want for our model. We also feature some magnificent drone footage from our new drone pilot, Dan Schneidel in modeling ideas from above where he shares with us that big boy locomotive 4014 running through its countryside and all of its glamour and beauty. It's a real treat to see the footage that he has filmed for us this month for What's Neat. Also this month I'd like to thank all the folks that do watch the What's Neat this week podcast every Saturday. We bring it to you and we share with you all the new products in the hobby from the big companies and the mom and pop companies alike along with special guests that we get to share their passion for this. The best hobby in the world, model rariting. I'd also like to thank Lombard Hobbies for sponsoring the What's Neat show. A few of our podcast members have made purchases from them in the last month and the service has been second to none. It's been great and including myself, I'd like to say thank you very much for the great service that I received. So if you've got purchases to make in the hobby, check them out at Lombard Hobbies in Lombard, Illinois or order online at LombardHobbies.com. So now let's continue on with the rest of this February 2021 What's Neat. For this segment of What's Neat, it's our first layout interview since COVID has started. And I'm standing here with Steve and Austin Allard. You'll remember them from the podcast, at least Austin you've been on the show a lot. And I remember one show that we did for What's Neat, you were with Rand Hood and you guys were discussing layout design and you got a lot of good information from that, didn't you? Oh, absolutely. And I remember standing in his living room talking about cornfields and saying how I thought they were boring, but that's all changed now. So we're standing in your brand new layout. Before we talk about this, I want to talk about your old layout because we've got some good video clips of that. And of course, this has always been a father and son team, which is the magic of model rariting as part of it. But you guys had a really neat layout down here. There was miles of track. It was kind of in the middle of the room and on the outside of the room all at the same time, wasn't it? Yeah, it was kind of hodgepodge together and this went through what? About six or seven different versions. And it just got originally started like this as the exterior. And then we kind of moved it inside, as he said, and just changed it and changed it and changed it. And finally, I'm like, you know, enough is enough. We've kind of realized that we're never going to get the scenery. We're never going to actually do the exterior walls as you should with dry wall and tore it all down and said, let's do it right. So now you've been building this layout since December. And we've got some construction pictures that we've shown off in the show. You've literally literally studded out all the basement walls and finished them. You sprayed the ceilings black. It looks like you've carpeted this whole area and all the bench work is built on the wall and it's double level. Explain to me why this layout is double level, Steve. Well, Austin can have the top level. And one of the things that we want to make sure of when we develop this layout was that we didn't have to exchange trains on the same tracker. Have we want everything totally different? So he got the top, I get the bottom. Mine is smaller because I just don't have as, I guess, as many trains to put on yard tracks and things like that. So it works out great for me, great for him. That's really awesome. This layout is magnificent in that you can run really long trains. And that was your point, wasn't it? Oh, yeah. I always like running long trains. It's what I think is accurate. Normally, I would ask you what's the minimum radius. But overall, tell us what are the general radiuses on this layout? A lot of the corners are forty eight. There's one corner back there that's seventy. There's a couple other ones that are sixty. But with running longer trains, you definitely need a wider radius to get physics. And you run two trains at once here. Yes, yes, very much so double mainline. Now, I noticed the top layout is DCC because Austin, that's what you do. And tell me, how's the bottom layout powered? Well, right now it's just DC, but I do have a number of feeders going around and I have the wire and we do have another system right that I can hook up. So mine will convert over to DC. I wanted to run my new engines that I got and they don't have decoders in them. And I don't know how to put the decoders in that well. So I thought, I'll just run them and kind of get that out of my system before we start building some more. No, I'm ready to help him with putting decoders in. And we got to wire some more feeders. But that's easy to do on this layout. I decided to wire, we got like doorbell wire and I wired the feeder to the rail joiner and then drilled holes. So lots of learning with this. It's amazing. So tell me the two levels now, what are the height of each? The top level, the top of the foam here is 53 and a half. And I believe yours is 14 inches below. Yeah. So that would be 39 and a half. Yeah, closer to 37, I think mine is. So mine is not as deep. So I don't have, I can't crawl in as deep. So there's a false back there. And I just enough to, you know, be able to run two tracks through and put some scenery in the front and I'll be happy. What's that false back? Is that Masonite painted blue? Yes. And then I just put two by three's. I screwed them down and I figured it. So when I drop the styrofoam in that a two foot wide or 16 inch wide piece, which I get three out of a four foot board will fit in between that board and in between this. So I have a kind of a lay nice. Now, Steve, you were telling me that you had built some storage into this layout. Why don't you show us some of that? Yeah, I have a I put a number of drawers in here and go to Lowe's and get these really nice drawer slides. I started over there and I realized that you can't make them out of two by three's because you can't fit boxes in them. So I've made all the ones that will go down here. They'll be all two by or one by fourth thickness. So I have a little deeper thing. So when I'm done with the train, I can stack it away. You know, I have a number of different areas and a number of different drawers that each has their own different train in it. So these drawers replace the fact that Austin on top has built a switch yard, but on your layout down below, you haven't. Is that right? Correct. Yes. And I'll have two small side tracks on the backside. I have a little deeper back there, but they really aren't enough to hold a full train. Well, now we're going to look at the layout drawing. And you said that Jeff Meyer had drawn this layout plan for you, Austin. And we're looking at it right now. You've got a lot of scenery and a lot of buildings and structures to build. Don't you? I sure do. There's going to be a nice river section that I'm sure he's running B roll of right now. There's going to be several different interlocking towers. In fact, if you go right here in the middle of the yard, there's going to be a yard tower like Dupo, but I'm only going to build half the tower so that you'll be able to look as you're standing here, you'll be able to look through the windows and be able to see right into the yard is like Jeff Meyer would be able to. This is absolutely amazing. Another question I've got in my mind now is to describe the type of trains and what era is it that you're going to model? 2013 Union Pacific, Jefferson City sub. And that explains the lab at the Coltrane that we see in a lot of auto rack trains. Yeah, I got symbols for them all at the help of people I know at the railroad. There's a couple guys I know back in the day, 2012, 2013, the era that I'd like to model that videotaped everything that went by and they posted it to YouTube. So I literally went on last week, typed this train symbol into YouTube and just floods and floods of videos came up and I'm like, this is I'm grateful for them now that they did that because it makes it a whole heck of a lot easier to model. This is absolutely amazing. Steve and Austin, you guys as a father and son team. I mean, come on, get together, boys. It's really it's the magic of the hobby that you guys can share this hobby together and what you built here is absolutely all inspiring. And it's going to motivate a lot of other people out there to build labs. Well, great. Thank you. We're happy. We're very we're proud of it. We're happy. We did a lot of work. We got to this point. Now we just feel like running trains until we get enough energy and mental capacity to start doing scenery and other things. We've hit a couple of holes so far, but I think to go this far in a year, we've done pretty good. Is there any shout outs you want to give? Because I know you had a lot of help on this. Yeah, shout out to the befodians for helping plumbing. Steve Mantia for the electrical Raymond Brown for doing a lot of the help with the wiring and a lot of other stuff. Thank my dad because he's the best. Dave across the street, Dave across the street. He taught us how to do. Yeah, he do joints on the wall board. The wall board is instead of putting your four by eight horizontally, it's vertical. He came through and just took the joint compound and one row. And it's that's what it looks like. So I'm I'm pretty amazed. There's a lot of people I'm sure I'm forgetting people though. But one thing about this layout, we were able to design that also came up with we were able to put an area for seating or have a bathroom area. We have our desk work area, a little refrigerator down here. So it's become more of a social place to gather as well as run trains. Guys, I say it all the time. This is, in fact, the best hobby in the world with the best people in it, just like Austin Allard and Steve. And so that's this segment for what's neat. Thank you. I'm James Regear. And for this segment of what's neat, I'm going to show you how to animate a prime straddle like Rotary Beacon on a locomotive using 0402 LEDs and an Atmol tiny 13 microcontroller chip. Now, lighting Rotary Beacons consists of convincingly has been a challenge in model railroading until recently. Most were based off of flashing or dimming patterns using a single LED or incontestant bulb. And as decoders have advanced and as DCC has advanced, manufacturers have actually tweaked this pattern to achieve better realism. But because the Rotary Beacon has still been a single LED, it lacks a rotation without a certain amount of imagination. But what if we could take four LEDs and put them into sequence because of regular straddle light was actually four incontestant bulbs that were sequenced to fire off in sequence so that it looked like a rotation. Now, Aaron Heine actually worked on this problem and he developed a kit to upgrade Rotary Beacons on HO scale locomotives with four LEDs several years ago. The kit used a microcontroller chip that Heine had programmed to flash the LEDs in sequence, just like the real straddle light. About a year ago, Rapido became the first manufacturer to offer a functional four LED Rotary Beacon with the release of their B36-7. And I thought, wait a minute, I'm going to get this locomotive. And what am I going to do with the rest of the locomotives in my fleet? They're not going to quite look right with their single flashing beacons, are they? I knew how to program an Arduino. But what if I could transfer that to something smaller that would fit in a cab? Well, let's get started. The first thing we want to do is build our circuit and we'll do this even before we start programming the Arduino. And because this is where we're going to see the results of our programming to make sure that we're on our right track. So the first thing we need to do is interconnect the grounds on our breadboard. And you see, there's one black wire running from the one side to the other, both the Arduino and the a tiny 13 chip have a common cathode arrangement. This is the opposite of a decoder. And so while I like to use the blue and positive function common on the decoder for my resistors, here I'm actually going to be using the common cathode. So that's where we're going to put our four 1K ohm resistors for our four LEDs. Next, let's add the ground from the Arduino to the breadboard. Then let's wire pin 13 to LED one, pin 12 from the Arduino to LED two, pin 11 to LED three and pin 10 to LED four. Then as we're adding in the LEDs, I'll just briefly mention that it helps to use five colors in this all the way through. And that's one thing I wish I would have done because when we're getting to the magnet wires, when we're actually installing the tiny 0402 LED rotary beacons, it's a little bit difficult to keep them separate and collated in order to get the right flash pattern right away. And so that adds some frustration to the project. So if you can find five different colors of magnet wire, that would be the best way to go about this. So now that we've set up our circuitry, it's time to go ahead and go to our Arduino sketch. And look at how we're going to write this program for the Arduino. So the first thing we're going to lay out is our constants and our variables. So we're going to set up our integers or the INT. Now these will be LED one equals 13. That will mean that LED one is like to pin 13. LED two is equal to 12, meaning it's pin 12, LED three to 11, LED four to 10. Now we want to establish lengths of time here. We're going to write variables called longs, and each long will be assigned a number of milliseconds or millis. And the beauty of setting up the time as a variable early on in the process is that later on, if we want to tweak it, we can simply do that right at the variable level rather than hunt through the entire program, looking for numbers to change. So we're going to say long on time to represent the length of time each beacon will be on and we'll set that at 200 millis. In principle, this would be good enough because we're dealing with four lights that will flash in succession. And therefore, in theory, there should be no overlap. But wait a minute. These are all incandescent bulbs that we're representing here. And incandescent bulbs have a warm up time and a cool down time that one needs to take into consideration. In other words, they don't switch off instantaneously. So we're going to say long transition on and set that at 50 millis. And then we're going to add long transition off and set that at 125 millis. Next, we have our void setup. And this is where we tell the Arduino what each pin will do. And in this case, all of our pins are output. So we type pin mode and then open parentheses LED one comma output. And we do that for each of the four LEDs. And that's our setup. Next up is the void loop. And this is a series of equations and instructions that tell the Arduino what to do. And the void loop will actually repeat an infinite number of times as long as the Arduino has power. The first thing we want to do is to establish a couple unsigned longs. And these are things that change over time to let the Arduino know that it is to keep track of the time and do certain things at certain times. So the first thing is unsigned long current millis equals millis. And this simply means that we are going to be using the Arduino's internal timer and that we are telling it to act at certain times when the value of millis reaches a certain amount. So then the next line is unsigned long time difference equals current millis minus previous millis. The rest of the void loop is a series of if slash else if slash else statements. So first we're going to look at LED one. So we say if the time difference is less than or equal to the on time plus the transition off, then we will digital write LED one high. In other words, LED one starts off high as long as as long as it's the on time plus transition off or less. Now then we write else if time difference is less than or equal to four times on time minus transition on. And if that condition exists, then we write LED one as low. And finally, for LED one, we write else if time difference is less than or equal to four times the on time, then we digital write LED one as high. And the reason for this is that we have that transition on that we want to add to LED one and LED ones transition on has to come at the end of the cycle. So now we move to LED two and there we say that if the time difference is less than or equal to time on minus transition on, then we digital write LED two as low. In other words, we want LED two to start the cycle off. So next we write else if time difference is less than or equal to two times on time plus transition off, then we write LED two as high. And finally, we write else if time difference is less than or equal to four times the on time, we digital write LED two as low. Now, you'll notice there's a pattern here and we're always sort of bumping up the multiplier by one for each LED. And that continues on through the other two LEDs. And we're not going to go through that in detail. I do want to note, however, that LED four has its transition off actually at the beginning of the cycle, much like LED one has its transition on at the end of the cycle, meaning that we write if the time difference is less than or equal to transition off, then we digital write LED four as high. And finally, we say else and then previous millis equals current millis. And so what this does is remember, previous millis has been cycling up and up until it's four times on time. And that's the length of our whole cycle. So that's where we tell it that it needs to equal current millis so that we restart our cycle. Now, I'll make this whole sketch available. And hopefully with the information that I've given here, you'll know how to tweak it if you want to do so. Once we have the sketch written down, we can transfer it to our Arduino and breadboard combination. And we can give it a test. And if the beacons flash to satisfaction, then we are done with the programming portion of it. If not, then we go back and tweak it. Once you have the program written to your satisfaction, then you can go ahead and get your A-Tiny 13 chip ready for the burn. We talked about this a little bit with the Trackmobile project and the process of getting the Arduino and breadboard ready for burning the A-Tiny 13 chip is very much the same. I'll put up a link to the website with the tutorial for this on the I'll reward hobbyist article. As for the program, there's just a slight modification necessary. Go ahead and change the pin numbers from 13, 12, 11 and 10 to 4, 3, 2 and 1. Because that is where they are located on the A-Tiny 13, which only has six programmable pins. Now, with the A-Tiny 13 all programmed in, we're going to look at how this needs to be wired up to fit onto your decoder. Now, looking at this diagram, we see the blue wire and that's the function common coming from the decoder. Now, we also see that through a 1K ohm resistor, it's going into the into the first pin of that A-Tiny 13. Now, if you have a decoder that already has the resistors in it and is LED compatible, then you don't necessarily need this 1K resistor. You can just simply go into the positive pole of the A-Tiny 13. But we have that in here just just just in case. The green wire, of course, is coming from the function wire of your decoder. And you want to have this function on your decoder set to constant on. And then off of the off of the function wire, you have your your resistor, a 1K resistor going to your LEDs. Now, remember, you have the common cathode on this decoder. And then from there, we go from pin one to LED one, pin two to LED two, pin three to LED three, pin four to LED four. And there were set up. Once you have this established, you can continue on to soldering your 0402 LEDs onto wires. Now, here I'd say you want to solder the wires as neatly as possible and do it so that they both go to one side of the LED. In other words, you're going to want to solder the blue wire to the positive pole of your LED and have it directed so that it comes out the bottom of the rotary beacon with the LED standing on its end. Then you'll want to do the same for your negative wire so that it comes out of the end of the rotary beacon. Unfortunately, this part of it is a little bit too small to do a demonstration video effectively. Once you have the LED sets soldered together to the wires, go ahead and paint them generously with silicone conformal coating. Now, this step will actually serve to insulate the LEDs from each other because the wires would almost certainly be touching inside that tiny LED dome otherwise, give them overnight to dry. You can then take the wire ends and plug them into your breadboard and the same alignment as the LEDs that you're testing. And your new rotary beacon lights should fire right up. So the next thing you need to do is to prepare the prime straddle light beacon detail part. I usually like to use the ones from after Genesis. This is the same part that after news is for its Genesis locomotives. And in fact, in this case, I'm using the same beacon detail part that came with the locomotive. Now, my first step is to carefully drill out the rotary beacon to widen the hole with a one sixteenth inch drill bit. I then widen it a little bit more with a three thirty second inch drill bit. Remember, we're trying to accommodate four LEDs in that very small space. So a little bit of widening is necessary. Now, what I also found in sort of a Naha moment was that I wanted to take a number sixty drill bit and drill a little dimple into the top of the dome in order to accommodate the wire ends of of the LEDs. And that's something I'd not thought about before. But once I made that drilling point, the LEDs actually mounted a little bit better. And with that, it's a matter of soldering your wire ends from your LEDs to your a tiny thirteen terminals and then soldering your a tiny thirteen and wiring it to the decoder of your locomotive. And there you have your rotary beacon completed. All the products seen on this episode of What's Neat are available from Lombard Hobbies in Lombard, Illinois, or order online at LombardHobby.com.