Planetary Space Base Upgrade #1

One aspect of space themed builds I find interesting is the localized detail that is possible.  Here are several examples from an Imperial Star Destroyer I saw at Nebraska Brick Days this summer.  Obviously when you zoom in, the parts are easily identified.  But backing up just a little and the design takes on whole new visual effect.  From my plastic molding days, I like to call this "texture". 

The entire Imperial Star Destroyer build can be seen here, it is truly amazing.

I have done a lot of building with tiles.  The tile approach is very good for architecture type builds, but I am now convinced that the "texture" approach is far superior when building space based builds.  Here is one section of the Planetary Space Base that was done in tiles and curved tiles.  It is very clean and antiseptic.  But that is not what the real space that I am trying to model actually is.

Here is another area of the same section.  The top of the main space cannon has texture on the top and sides, along with some sand green curved tiles.  Part of the upgrade is to replace the tiles where it makes sense.  In this case, I will keep some of the sand green since it is the color theme I am using.

As in model train layouts, using a localized scene is very useful and it adds to the excitement.  This is where you take a small area and add as much detail as possible, but with a theme.  Here are two examples.

Here we have a combination of texture and tiles with a scene.  The texture is off to the left and right, while the sand blue tiles form the walk way.  Each Blacktron MiniFig has a computer terminal to monitor the Vertical Generator status as they observe what is happening.

This view is a combination of tiles and a scene.  The sand blue tiles form the walkway between the main control panel and the secondary controls behind the main control panel.  Each Blacktron Minifig is at a main control panel with multiple controls and multiple indicators to monitor the status of the Horizontal Generator.

As I progress with updating the detail of the Planetary Space Base and the large cliff that will be behind the entire base, I will provide an update as each section is finished.

Train Layout Progress #2

Infrastructure Rebuild

One of the first tasks was to reconstruct the double deck straight section.  I had dropped this section while placing on top of the straight single deck section, in preparation for shipping.  There were multiple things wrong with it.  Several of the supports were broken and some of the track on the edge was ripped up.  I also found there was short in the track in this section.  That does not include the unfinished portions, mainly the train station area.  

First I replaced the broken supports with ones that were a little more beefy.  Previously the underlying plywood was screwed into the supports and the Homasote glued on to the plywood.  That necessitated using the oscillating saw to cut those screws, while having a vacuum right there to suck up most of the filings.  Then used my new vacuum extension to pickup the remaining filings.  

The next three pictures show the corner that it was dropped on.  The three supports that were there were broken.  Mostly it was 1X2 lumber that was glued into an L-Shape.  This was replaced with 1X4 lumber on the vertical and 2x2 lumber for the horizontal with triangular plywood supports.

The reverbation of the drop destroyed the support underneath the bridge and at the joint to the corner piece.  I used 1x4 lumber for the vertical and a 1x3 for the horizontal was already there, since it spans the width of the layout at this point.

Track Realignment

With that done, I could concentrate on the station yard.  I never like the amount of free space around the front of the train station.  While the track layout offered maximum flexibility, it also includes routes that were very likely not to be used.

Thus I changed to this. It gave me almost the same flexibility, but provided more space around the front and two sides of the train station for roadways and parking areas.

This realignment allowed for the station tracks to be extended a small amount,  Here I am setting the station tracks.  As I have shown in the past, I use a laser and a homemade jig to place the tracks in a straight line.   I use the laser line to line up the center rail nubs.

Now I can move on to the catenary and signals in the station yard.  None of this had been done before the move.

 

Train Layout Progress This Summer #1

Part of the time this summer was spent rebuilding the train layout.   Here is a partial picture of where it was in the previous house.  It is hard to see, but there is an 8 foot section that is to the left to make an L-shaped layout.

Here is how it ended up in the current location.

Originally I had intended to have the same basic L-shaped layout.  Using the drawings for the house and initial measurements I made, showed it would fit, but the margin was less than a few inches.  Once the layout was in place, I was a few inches short.  The quick answer is I will build a connector across the far side of the room.   A bigger layout, this had to be a better thing.

Preparing the layout for transport, required stacking the straight double deck (right side of above picture) on top of the straight single deck shown on the left side (once the legs were removed from the double deck).   The corner section was detached, more on that later.  While stacking the two straight sections, I dropped the double deck section.  There was some cosmetic damage, but it didnt look too bad.  Regardless there was no time for an depth examination or repair, so we picked the piece back up and attach it to the straight single deck section.

The next three pictures show the corner section being loaded into the moving van and fixed in place.

 Here is the single deck mounted on the double deck being loaded into the storage locker.

Once I moved the layout to the new location, I started the process of rebuilding.  The double deck had a few broken supports that needed replacing.  This was a slow process as the screws holding these in place had to be cut, using oscillating saw.

This entailed having to construct a new vacuum attachment in order to cleanup the metal shavings that fell on the track as well as the dust collected on storage.  I built this out of 1/2 inch PVC, that was 24" long.  The red electrical tape on the right was needed to create a better seal with the existing vacuum hoses. I also taped a brush on the cleaning end to loosen up dust.  The next version will have three brushes on the three exposed sides.

More on connecting the corner section with the double deck section in the next installment. 

USB HID Fun for Windows

Almost all the electronics I build rely on a USB HID connection.  USB HID is built into all major operating systems and makes device connection much simpler.  The downside is small transfer size, but my designs rarely move large amounts of data.  While I could probably write an OS driver for other USB implementations, that is time I would rather dedicated to new ideas.  On the Windows side I use RAD Studio (Delphi) to build the Windows Apps.  ( I also use this for the Android Apps).  For the USB HID component I have been using the JEDI project VCL controls, which include a USB HID non-visual control.  Once I determined the correct configuration, this has performed quite well.  It did take a few months to "wring out" all the nuances of the control.

Several months ago I started noticing issues when connecting to the device.  Then apps with USB HID interfaces would not compile. This all began with a new version of the compiler (10.4.x).  I backed up to the previous version and all was great, kind of.  There were still issues on occasion.  (In retrospect, it was only one computer, my HP Elitebook 850 G5, giving me issues on previously compiled apps.)

After too many days of researching this USB issue, I finally found it.  The USB HID component is part of the JEDI VCL library, provided as source.   The source is kept up to date through the JEDI group and has an extensive "ifdef" structure, to ensure backwards compatibility for many versions of RAD Studio.  The USB HID component is compiled when it is installed into the RAD Studio IDE  component palette, this way it is compatible with multiple versions of the compiler.  Sometime after version 10.4.2 of the compiler was released, several patches were released.  Long story short, when the USB HID was installed (without patches), the compilation corrupted the registry access when enumerating the installed HID devices. When I installed the latest version of the compiler on a clean PC, updated all the patches and then installed the USB HID component, it worked just fine, kind of....................

It worked on all the computers, except my HP Elitebook 850 G5 laptop, that is my primary computer.  I kept putting off working on it because it looked like some kind of driver/registry corruption and reinstalling windows and then all the software looked like the only solution.  Well that was not something I wanted to do.  But today it got to be too much, so before trying to reinstall Windows and rebuild the entire computer, I started debugging again. 

What I noticed is that sometimes it would enumerate some HID devices before failing and other times it failed immediately.  So then I started tracking Vendor ID/Product ID data on each device.  After several runs a trend started to appear, it was always the same device failing, but at different points in the enumeration.  Something called "HID Sensor Collection V2".  I disabled the device and then all of the USB HID programs started working.  Looking at my other two computers, neither has this device.  Further digging showed that Windows would allow the generic HID compatible driver to be attached to the device and that also worked.

I have a USB HID exerciser that Microchip use to provide for PIC USB HID development.  It is a small Windows program that gives you all the data on your device in order to verify operation.  It never shows this HID device, unless I use the generic HID driver.  What is happening is that a call to the Windows HID.dll is returning a failure(HidD_GetAttributes), which is verified by the error message the HID exerciser is showing.  Looking into the open source code I am using for the HID interface and tracing to the failure, it is the same call to the HID.dll.  So now I am pretty sure I have found the problem.

So what does this device do?  Dont know for sure, but it looks like it controls several accessories like accelrometer, gyro, temp etc.  The list of devices implies it is for a tablet or tablet mode of a PC.  For now I will use the generic driver and see if anything fails.  The error checking at that point in the code is not robust enough to handle that error and let the program continue to run. On the JEDI forum this problem had been previously noted and I added my data.  A proposed solution is to  ignore the error.  Workable, but not elegant.  Once I get a few more things done, I plan to return to this and see if I cant come up with a solution that will work for more people.

 

Summer is Over

Well all good things must come to an end.  Summer is over and we move on.  It was a busy summer, just not much progress for any of my projects.  Lots of road trips to see family and some playing tourist.

First trip started out a little cold.

Drove through Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Kansas, Arizona, to name a few.

 Our favorite restaurant in Rock Springs, WY

 

Best beef/turkey jerky and its in California.

Sunrise on the Continental Divide on Interstate 80.

 

Attended Brick Days in Omaha.  Decidedly Nebraska countryside theme was present.

With some minor additions.

Not only the coolest looking car, but also very fast.  Might be biased here.

Traveling through Woodward Oklahoma.

Finally made it, but could not find any of the famous residents.

Lonely highway in Utah.

On the edges of Monument Valley.  Unfortunately the park was closed for the safety of the Navajo Nation.

Hoover Dam and Lake Mead early in the Summer.

We were going to Rocky Mountain NP, but things did not work out.  But we managed a quick side trip to Dinosaur.

The quarry was amazing.

And we got in a short hike to see more fossils.

More coming!

Nebraska Brick Days

Greetings from Nebraska!

Attended Nebraska Brick Days (#brickdays)  this weekend.  Great to be at a live Brick Convention.  There were several train layouts, LUGs from as far away as St Louis and Northern Illinois.  Great MOCs were on display.  The door prize was the $800 Millennium Falcon. There was a small selection of vendors, not as many as at Bricks by the Bay, but better than I expected.  

Here are some of the MOCs on display.

This is the biggest LEGO creation I have seen in person.  This is a Model of the USS Makin Island, an LHA class ship.  It is not finished yet, the builder is still working on the island structure.  The aircraft were of exquisite detail.  Plus he had a landing craft entering the back.

 

 

 

Impressive Star Destroyer

Several of these audience MOCs that were quite detailed.

One person was working on multiple Star Trek vessels.

Very detailed pirate ships.

Finally Runza, the local Nebraska fast food eatery.