Brick Fest LIVE San Diego

I am finally getting to write a description of what it was like at Brick Fest LIVE San Diego, Saturday and Sunday, Nov 20-21.  Thanksgiving and friends delayed me, but fun was had by all at both the Lego show and Thanksgiving.  I have to temper this description with the fact that I had to stay with my display for most of the time. 

It was an interesting two days, given the environment we are now living in.  This was also the first Brick Fest LIVE I have been to.  The building was at the Del Mar Fairgrounds, north of San Diego proper.  There was a lot of open space as the picture shows.  Tickets were sold in time slots, mostly to control the number of people in the building at any one time.

 

 

There was a live show, three times a day.  A Brick Fest Live person warmed the crowd up and then Lego Masters participants  Manny & Nestor and Bryan & Lauren  each did 20 mins Q&A.  The Q&A was separated by a local magician. We were directly across from the stage and the comment on the Web Site that it would loud was very true.  Saw several young children with ear protection.

The crowd was actually very good.  I had attended a one day show in Omaha in July.  The Omaha show was in a smaller building, which made the crowd look larger.  The live show seating area was 80% full for most of the shows.  We had a steady stream of visitors from opening to about 4PM on both days. 

 

One of the highlights of Brick Fest LIVE is the life size models they have.  Here are a few.

They had several build tables.  One was just a collection of basic bricks in all colors.  People would build small MOCs and then several people combined to build a few large ones.  Event staff would come through occasionally and take things apart.  Fairly sure I saw I few smaller MOCs go out the door.  

Then they had one center table with a white castle and four surrounding tables of all white parts.  People would build additions to the castle and place them on the center table.  On Sunday there was an unplanned contest to see who could build the tallest spire.

 

  

The Brick Fest LIVE people had the main store, which was selling new sets.  There were other vendors selling Mini Figures, old Lego Sets and accessories.  The standard baseball hat with brick connectors was very popular.  

The MOC displays were in three areas.  San Diego LUG had several smaller displays and some running trains.  No train layout like you would see at other Lego conventions.  One of the most interesting was a Boy Scout troop that modeled a Boy Scout Summer Camp.  This was a very large display.  My youngest son was there on one day and having been an Eagle Scout and OA member, he noticed that the bathrooms were missing. 

 

This was next to a large Civil War battle scene.

 

 

 

The most interesting display was a pirate ship.  Someone had spent the early days of the pandemic building MOCs and the ship was the main result.  They said they had just been at Brick Fest LIVE Pasadena and were going to Colorado Springs in December.

 

 

 

Here is a collection of MOCs and other large displays.

 

It was a rewarding experience.  I always enjoy talking with people about how I build, the parts I use and what I am trying to model and how.  It is also interesting to receive feedback on whether or not I have acheived the effect I was aiming for.

Finally a short video of what I had there.

 

BrickFest Live San Diego CA

 

We are going to display at Brickfest Live in San Diego CA at the Del Mar Fairgrounds.  The dates are Nov 20 and 21, Saturday and Sunday.  

What we will be showing is the new version of the Planetary Space Base.  What is shown above is the original version displayed earlier.  This version was concave.  The new version will be convex with a mountain cliff behind it.  The mountain is only partially done right now.

 

As detailed in this blog post, I have been working on what I call "texture" of the MOC.  And as shown here.

Looking forward to meeting and talking to people about this project we are working on.  Might have some other surprises at the show also.

Nov 20/21 at Del Mar Fairgrounds, San Diego CA

More USB HID Implementation

In this blog post, I discussed the issues I was having with the RAD Studio Delphi compiler and the JEDI VCL implementation of a Windows USB HID Device. Eventually tracing it down to a HID device on one laptop that was causing the issue.  At the conclusion of that debugging exercise, I postulated that there was some issue with the JEDI VCL implementation of the USB HID device that needed improvement.

I spent a few hours today in between other projects attempting to track it down further.   Mostly because it was beginning to bug me.  I dont believe there is an error in the code, it works as designed. What is missing in all of my implementations is the OnDeviceCreateError handler. I have never seen documentation that this is to be implemented, other than a short comment in the read me file that it was included. It is not in any of the examples either.  

After tracing through the code, the absence of this handler was causing the code to fail out completely, since the error is not handled. The code snippet below is what appears to be the minimum required. So far it is working on two projects. Depending on why the device is failing, your implementation may need more error processing than shown here.  

procedure TformXXX.JvHidCtrlDeviceCreateError(Controller:
          TJvHidDeviceController; PnPInfo: TJvHidPnPInfo; var Handled, RetryCreate:Boolean);
begin
     Handled:= TRUE;
     RetryCreate:= FALSE;
     FreeAndNil(PnPInfo);
end; 

My only issue is that in development you will continue to receive the error message that the device cannot be identified, which is what started this. The error message appears when you open the project and close the project. So maybe there is some improvement that can still be done. But for me right now, this has dropped far down on my list of things to do. 

 

 

 

 

 

Train Layout Progress #5

 Connecting the two sections

I knew this was going to be difficult.  The plan was to line up the two pieces, push them together to the point that the track would start to touch.  Then use the bolts to slowly pull the two pieces together.  First I had to build a shelf for the top deck to rest on.  Prior to cutting it, both the underlying plywood and the homasote layer extended over the junction of the two pieces. 

Tightening the bolts slowly brought the two pieces together.  Lining up the track and keeping it lined up was hard.  There was lots of loosening and tightening until it went together.  The bottom deck was fairly easy.   The top deck had a relatively large gap in it as seen in these pictures.  

I used an oscillating saw to cut this.  The gap was not the large when I cut it.  I had to redo the connection of each track that crossed the gap with was different combination of tracks.  This gap had to caused when I dropped this during packing.  The whole upper deck must have moved back on the supports when it hit the floor.  I looked at trying to pull it back, but there was nothing to grab with a clamp to pull against.  I just added more track and will fill the gap with acrylic filler when the time comes.

This completes the train update.  More later on some trees I bought on Amazon, a more thorough track testing and explanation of the wireless train control I am using.

Train Layout Progress #4

Signals

The station yard has 4 tracks.  Three on the triple switch and one to the left, which is also a bypass path.  Then on the main lines that loop the station yard there are two more signals.  One can be seen on the right next to the steam engine.  The other is in the lower left. All of these are Marklin 7239 type signals.  The three on the triple switch are more cosmetic than providing train control functionality.  The three tracks are all dead ends at the station building. 

On all of these Marklin 7239 type signals I separated them from the base and mounted the signal mast on the supplied bracket.  The picture below shows the three bases mounted underneath. All of the wiring from the signal mast is 30 gauge multi strand wire or smaller.  It will break easily.  I used 30 gauge solid core wire wrap wire to extend these wires to the bases.

The bases do not have any type mounting frame.  They are meant to be attached to the track.  But there was a small flange on each side.

As the above picture shows I used a large fender washer to clamp the base to the wooden support frame.  Four of these are holding the three bases.  They are more than secure enough, especially sense they are not under any strain.  The following picture shows the three mounted on the wooden support frame.  On the far side is another signal base connected to another signal.

Here is another signal base mounted with smaller washers.

In the station yard there is a signal mast mounting bracket, but no signal mast. When I did the first layout design many years ago, this line was just a pass through the station.  But now it has become a stop and feeds into the main line going to the tunnel.  It should have a signal there to control the train going through.

A note on automated train control.  Going back to the original picture.  There are six lines that feed the final triple switch at the top of the picture.  This becomes the single track main line going into the downward direction of the helix that lowers the train to the lower level.  In an automated control system, all six of these tracks need to wait on a train that has entered the helix climbing up.  Once it has cleared to the right mainline or into the station, then a train waiting can proceed.

Wiring

What a mess😊.  The following three pictures show what is looks like right now.  The wiring can get concentrated at choke points like a controller or passing though a hole in the bench work.

For the most part I have followed the Original Marklin wire color coding.

RED - track power

YELLOW -  accessory power

BROWN - power return

ORANGE - catenary power

BLUE - turnout control lines

But in the "rats nest"  that all of these wires turn into, determining which blue wire is the left or right turnout is becoming difficult.  I had put a small piece of green shrink tubing on the blue wire with the green plug.  This became tedious so I move to a new scheme.  Almost all turnout and signal control wires will need to be extended.  I found some very flexible 28 gauge wire with a silicone jacket.  It is easy to strip and solder, thus it made ideal.  Now I extend the turnout signal control lines with green for the green plug and blue for the red plug.  For the few three wire controls I have, I will use orange for the orange plug.  Not ideal, but there are only three of them right now, so I it is manageable.  Using red wire to extend the reg plug control wire would have unmanageable. It would have bee to easy to cross that with track power. 

Here is a picture of the wire and the link to Amazon where I got it.

I have a wireless train control for turnouts, signals, track control that I designed my self.  It follows the early digital control ideas.  While the PC interface is mostly done, the GUI needs lots of work to be useful.  In the mean time I need control of turnouts and signals.  This especially true of those items that cannot be easily reached.  A great example is the large number of turnouts that control the hidden yard.  These are under the second deck with catenary across most of the tracks.  They are just not reachable.  

Using my new scheme I wired up the mechanical button controls for a lot of these signals and turnouts.  Here two 4 button blocks control the important turnouts on the lower deck.

Here two 4 button blocks control the five signals in the station yard and one turnout there.  The remaining two buttons control two signals on the low deck.

This has actually only scratched the surface of the wiring.  It is not complex, there are just a large number of them, which can make the task daunting.  

Oops!

 

Yep that is the TV portion of the NES set.  

While working on another Brick project, a small accident happened.  The chair I was using is a typical office chair that will sink a small amount when you sit down.  The depression was enough to allow the arm to just be under the table.  When I got out of the chair the arm hit the table.  The NES TV was on the stand (which is not the most stable platform) which was then on the NES.  The table vibrated just enough that the TV toppled off the table.  This is the result.

It took about 8-10 hours to build it.  Hopefully it will not take that long to rebuild it.

Train Layout Progress #3

Catenary

Next  was to finish the catenary in the station area.  This required putting in cross spans , multiple towers for the cross spans and then hanging the catenary under the covered passenger platform. 

There are four tracks in the station area, 3 of them ( on the left in this picture)  are attached to the triple turnout and dead end at the train station.  The fourth is a through track and is on the right.  They all converge at the single turnout at the bottom of the picture.

There are 3 cross spans, two short (7017) and one long (7016).   All of the cross spans are supported the towers.  I also used the towers in a few places to support regular catenary, but in places where it would support the catenary on both sides as shown here.

Here is another view of catenry setup in the station area.

The two towers in the foreground had to be lowered to ground level of the station area.  The two tracks in the foreground are not part of the station area.  One is main line around the station area and the other is a siding for car storage and place to load cars onto the track.  Since the station is depressed compared to the main line and the lateral distance is small, a retaining wall will be placed between the main line and the station area.  Since I had to cut into raised area, the retaining wall will have to jog around the towers to be realistic.  I dont see this as a major problem, but will require some attention to detail.

 

Here is another view that shows the height difference and the cutout needed for the tower.

Eventually I intend to top each tower with an LED spotlight.  I will either modify the 7046 style with an LED or purchase one of the new LED spotlights for towers that are now available.

The far left side of the triple switch posed special problems.  In the photos below this track is shown from different perspectives.  The issue here is how to run the catenary down this track.  It cant go on the right side, since the covered passenger platform is there.  On the left side are single track passenger platforms.  The choices appeared to be either build the catenary tower into the single track passenger platform or somehow separate the two platforms to leave space for the catenary towers.  

What I did was to separate the two platforms.  Then I took some of the unused short platform pieces and broken catenary towers that I had, and combined the two.  The next photo shows this.  I used pieces of broken towers and parts from sprues of the passenger platform kit.  The towers are made of plastic that does not accept model glue.  I used cyanoacrylate (super glue) to glue down the two tower pieces, the tower and the base, both green in this picture.  Then is used the cyanoacrylate and model glue for the two side pieces.  The two side pieces are part markers from the model sprue.  This gave the area an industrial look of being marked, while providing extra strength for the tower.  I used cyanoacrylate to glue the side to the green tower parts and model glue for the bottom that interfaces with the base.  So far this has proven to be quite strong. 

I did not like the gap in the cover, but for now I have not thought of a better solution.

Underneath the large covered passenger platform I had space between the two covered tracks to place standard catenary towers.  One set went at the end near the train station.  The other set was placed between the second and third platform (from the station) and then it connects to the cross span.  A single 7019 catenary wire spans the length of one platform.  Between the first and second platform, I connected the two 7019 catenary wires with the standard connection screws.  The covered passenger platform comes with plastic support pieces for the catenary.  I have not installed these yet, because I am not sure how permanent these are.

 Right now this all for looks, eventually I want to run the analog electric engines on this path or a second digital circuit.