New Year Update

It's been a busy few weeks on the railway front. First it was the SWOONs open day on the Saturday where I had my sales stand for STModels and then it was the annual committee meeting on the Sunday for the 009 Society which, in my role as 009 News Editor, I attend. The following weekend was the regular Wiltshire 009 Group meeting. Then it was the 2 day Southampton show where I was exhibiting Melin Dolrhyd as well as having the STModels sales stand. Last weekend it was the Alton show where I helped operate Garreg Wen for Matt Kean.

All set up and ready for customers at Southampton

STmodels continues to grow and I have done 3 commissions in the past month. The first was for some tank wheels, the second was for some Vale of Rheidol lattice fencing and lastly a request for Southern Railways 8 Wire Concrete fence posts. The last two are available to be bought on STModels.

Southern Railways 8 Wire Concrete posts

The layout with no name has also progressed. It now has the track down, it's wired up and a small amount of scenery has been created. The points are planned to be operated by wire in tube and that has been installed but doesn't show up in the photo. 

Adding the backscene former

The track plan is roughly what was on the initial sketches on the notice board. In the end the actual positioning of the points was dictated by my stock. The points are positioned such that I can have a Bachmann Baldwin and one WD bogie in the headshunt whilst also having 3 WD bogies in the loop and being able to run round them. The section of track between the loop and the running line is long enough to hold a Baldwin without fouling the running line.

The most recent job has been to add the backscene former. This was created with a piece of timber across the back, down the sides and along the bottom to which a piece of 5mm ply was glued. It's added some much needed rigidity to the board. 

The trouble is that it has given me a headache I hadn't envisaged. The layout was planned as something to take to shows that was simple, more easily transportable and more light hearted than Melin Dolrhyd. Keeping it simple was the mantra. The problem is that with it in the railway room against the wall I can't easily reach the point switches. The electrical section switches don't matter as they will always be on. I can just reach the point switches but have a habit of knocking trains off the track. I know I will want to 'play' with the layout and use it to test stock running through the points so it really needs to be useable in the railway room.

The only sensible thing to do is to change the point operation so that it can be operated from the front as well as the back. If I want to extend the mechanical operation in some way then I will have to break up that lovely curved front of the layout, that is if I could work out how to do it!

In the end I have to go back to point motors but I have decided to try servos - this layout was aimed at trying new things, after all. I am currently looking at an Arduino to drive the servos. I had already planned an Arduino Uno to operate a couple of working signals. All this means is I have to extend the system to handle the points as well.

In the stash I have an Arduino Mega, some Dingo servo mounts and some 9g servos. Time for a little experimentation!

Another 3 months between posts!

Oh dear, the number of posts on this blog is definitely going down. Mind you, it is fair to say that a lot has happened in the last 3 months.

We finally moved house in August. We now live in Port Solent, which is a marina complex on the South Coast (well it would be on the coast, wouldn't it) and we are loving it. Here's the view 2 minutes from the house. On a summer's day it is glorious and the sunsets are something else. A kayak is on the buy list for next summer.

I did start my business, STModels, and went to the 009 Open Day in Pewsey and also to the Welshpool Gala where I sold a few items and got the name out there a little. It will never be a big source of income but it was fun and I hope to fill a gap in the market for those who still like to build their own rolling stock. 

As I already mentioned, I took Melin Dolrhyd to the Welshpool Gala, this time with Matt as my second operator. It was an extremely enjoyable few days and I hope to attend next year. Looking ahead, I have confirmed bookings for Melin Dolrhyd for the Southampton show in January and SW Herts show in May. Hopefully there will be more. I am also hoping to take my STModels trade stand to the 009 member's day in Ilton in January.

So what to personal modelling. A new house means a new modelling room. I have taken one of two rooms in the loft conversion for the railway room. There was another option in the house but this room has the best light and does have an 11 foot straight wall. Here's an early days picture as everything was being unpacked (come to think of it, it isn't much tidier 2 months later!).

Of course, nothing works out as expected. I have two bookcases and could only fit one under the eaves so that has reduced the 11ft run. I had expected to keep Melin Dolrhyd up here somewhere but the final stairs to the loft conversion are narrow and I cannot realistically get the main board up them so that has to find a home somewhere else in the house. I really like cameo layouts but they can be bulky and so need more storage and manoeuvring space.

In terms of actual modelling I have 2 areas of focus going forwards. The first is engines. Another good friend, Andy, has built my two Golden Arrow chassis for the Welshpool Beyer Peacocks, they now need finishing ahead of the next show. I also have a Sir Drefaldwyn, and another Sierra Leone locomotive to build. Joan also needs a rebuild and detailing. There may be another Welshpool preservation engine in the stash that I have forgotten but that's enough to be going on with! 

The second area of focus is a new layout. Here's where the big problem lies. What do I do next? I had planned an Ashover based layout. I have a long term plan to do a Bowaters based layout and I am keen to do another Welshpool layout. The problem is that the motivation isn't there at this time to start something that uses multiple boards and handbuilt track and has a high degree of authenticity. Modelling something realistic takes time, a lot of it and I am just not enthused by the idea.

I recently went to the Hayling Light Railway 20th Gala and they had a small model railway exhibition where I saw an 009 layout that was a small roundy roundy layout which offered the potential to be a single board layout that can be chucked in the back of the car and taken to shows. It won't run most of my stock but it will run my Baldwins which were ready for Ashover and I do have a surprising number of 009 Society kits of RNAD vans and Hudson Toastrack coaches that can be quickly built and used. 

It's going to be a complete anathema to what I would normally do but has the advantage of being able to be done relatively quickly. The rough plan is going to be something like this which will allow a train to run round whilst some shunting takes place.

It's not realistic, how could it be with those curves on either side, but it will offer the opportunity to try a few things, play trains, and generally not take modelling too seriously over the winter. 

I need to get on with it. I no longer have a garage and all woodwork needs to be done in the car port which will only get colder so timber was bought and cut this last week and a start has been made. Even though it is supposed to be a quick layout on a 4' by 2' board, I still couldn't bring myself to have a straight front!

I have no idea for a name so answers on a postcard please!

Computers and Model Railways

No, I'm not converting the layout to DCC! The layout ran well at Maidenhead with the exception of the two oldest locomotives. My model of "Earl" and my friend's model of "Countess" were not happy with the 12" radius points. "Earl" would fight its way through the points but "Countess" would only operate on the straight track. this is due to them being 20+ years old and using wheels with deep flanges which hit the check rails on the curves. "Earl" was able to go further since it has flangeless centre drivers. Combined with the deep wheels are the outside frames which mean there is no scope for opening the back to back of them. This, hopefully, isn't the end of the world as I have replacements for "Earl" and "Countess" which are planned to be built in the coming months and they will use modern wheel sets. If that fails then I will have to resort to mainline points which are 18" radius but I hope not to go there since that will reduce the length of the sidings by 4" overall.

The only problems encountered at Maidenhead was operator error on setting the points with the occasional stutter over the frogs. The stuttering will be sorted with point motors with frog switches. In my last post I mentioned I was short of one MP1 point motor. The estimated delivery of mid December came and went and another good friend, Adrian, offered me one from his secret stash so I bought that and had enough to start.

The next issue was whether I could reduce the operator error? Get better operators would be the correct answer but that would mean I wasn't allowed to operate my own layout! Traditional operation would have a switch for each point which still leaves scope for not setting them correctly. They could be paired up so that each switch operates the corresponding point at the opposite end. That would reduce the errors but was never going to fully eliminate them. One answer was to operate the points using a push button for each track that, when pressed, would change all the necessary points to make that track the running line. It had to be done!

This is the finished result from above.

The five sidings match 5 push button switches top left. This is matched by 5 LEDs next to the switches. The LEDS flash while the points are changing and go solid green when the points are set. The location of the switches is such that when operating the layout from one side (whilst talking to visitors) I can reach them. The is a red LED below the 5 green ones which will flash if something goes wrong and blips every 5 seconds to say the system is working. 

As an aside, have a look at the photo above and tell me where the baseboard side has gone. There is clearly some trick of the light taking place but I cannot see the baseboard side on the edge at the bottom of the picture - weird!

How did I do it, you may well ask. Well let me tell you. I have previously experimented with PIC controllers and briefly considered them but I would need to build a microprocessor board to make it work and the chance of failure would be high. I decided to take a look at the Raspberry Pi and Arduino group of educational systems. These are prebuilt microcontroller boards for which there are a variety of accessory cards, meaning there would be little extra circuitry to wire up. I didn't look too closely at the Raspberry Pi as when I looked at the Arduino it seemed to be ideal for the job.

Pictured above is the Arduino Uno by Keyestudio, wired up and fixed under the fiddle yard. The standard Uno features 14 digital input/output pins and 6 analog input pins. I also picked up the next variant, the Mega, which has many more inputs and outputs. The nice thing about these microcontrollers is that they use a standard USB connector to hook up to the computer, an off the shelf  9V power supply and they are programmed in 'C'. 'C; is the programming language I used most in my career, along with assembly language, so I felt at home straight away. The reality was that writing a program to flash the light on the PCB took me all of 10 minutes. 

Once the microcontroller was decided on then I needed a way to drive the point motors. I bought a solid state relay board but then discovered that it could only switch mains AC so that went back. Instead, I bought an Elegoo 8 channel relay board, shown above. The wiring is a neat ribbon cable to the Arduino and the relays have screw terminals to drive the point motors. The photograph above shows the board with one point motor still to be wired up.

It might be at this point that those of a less nerdy disposition should skip the next few paragraphs down to the photo of the point motor.

What remained was to connect the switches and the LEDs to the Arduino. The LEDs are simply driven from the remaining digital outputs (8 are used for the relays) They need a resistor inline to limit the customer so I used a small piece of strip board shown above. At this point I had run out of the digital inputs/outputs. I could have used the Arduino Mega but as there were unused analog inputs I used those. All it took was a pullup resistor on each input and each switch forces the respective input to zero.

The program was written in Arduino's latest Interactive Development Environment. After the initialisation sequence, the program looks for switch presses and changes the points accordingly. the biggest headache was considering how swiftly to change the point motors. I've got a 2A 9V supply driving the system which is more than enough to drive all point motors at once. However, every time a point motor changes, there will be a spike on the supply as the relay switches and as the point motor kicks in. It is theoretically possible that having all point motors go at once could cause a spike on the microcontroller. Separate power supplies for the motors compared to the microcontroller would help but this is an overkill. All I did was put a 0.2 second delay between each point motor change. This will mean there is a series of smaller spikes over the time taken for all point motors to change.

In order to simplify the brain cells required to understand the program I have two constants in the program, STRAIGHT and CURVED. These apply to the point movement. I also set the standard that the normally closed contacts on the relay card drive the points to the STRAIGHT direction. 

The startup sequence is also interesting. If you configure the point motor input/outputs as outputs then the outputs are immediately driven low which causes all the relays to fire at once. I discovered that you can write the outputs high before you configure them and this value is latched internally and used on configuration so none of the relays fire on power up.

The power up issue still occurs if the points are left in random positions when you turn the power off. Thankfully there can never be all the points in the CURVED way at once. Whilst each switch only changes the minimum number of points needed to achieve the goal of a particular track, the switch for the middle track drives all the points to the STRAIGHT position so it can also serve as an end of day switch to put everything to a known state.

I did put in a 6th LED which blips every 5 seconds just to say the system is still working. It will also flash more vigorously if it gets a weird input from the switches but I realised I wrote the software in such a way that it doesn't look for anything other than the 5 individual switch presses.

 

The point motors themselves were mounted on a small square of 9mm ply using M2.5 screws as shown above. I wired in each point motor and then held it roughly in place and fired it in both directions to find the optimum place. Once satisfied, I drew round the block of ply and used the hot glue gun to stick the block to the underside of the baseboard. Once done, I felt the position wasn't optimal. The rod that drives the point was hard against the point at each face. The MP1s have an adjustable throw and I had set them all to the smallest one, 3mm, but it was still too much. Peco points have a throw of just over 2mm. I solved this by removing the point motor and using two pieces of 9mm ply instead of just the one. This meant there was some slop at each end but the point always moves. If you ever get the position wrong, the MP1 has adjustments in all 3 dimensions. It really is a clever piece of kit.

With a computer controlled system like this, you do have to ask yourself what you would do if it went wrong. If it isn't a simple wire falling out then the "at an exhibition" option is to drop out the point motors (most of them you can just drop out the control rod) and also disconnect the frog wires. At that point it reverts to the manual operation that was used at Maidenhead.

There it is. Approximately £40 of expenditure and a few extra hours to wire it up and debug the program. It gets its first outing at the Basingstoke show in March - a 2 day show that will give it a good test!

And to cap it all. I finished the fiddle yard yesterday and within an hour I got n email saying my MP1 point motors, ordered in November, have finally shipped!

Enginering Works Complete

Long post alert! The last few weeks have seen some significant activity to get the layout working again. Mostly it went well but there was one setback...

In my last post I said it was time to get on with the ballasting. I decided to use my usual Woodland Scenics but using the medium rather than fine versions. The more I looked at the pictures of the trackbed the more I realised I had been incorrectly using the fine size and the individual stones were larger than I had imagined. I mixed up some light grey and grey to give it tone and put it down. I stuck it down with watered down PVA with the obligatory liquid soap but I did have misgivings on how it looked. It was really too bright and I had made the mix 50:50 and it would probably be better at 80:20. I tried toning it down but that made it worse....

I was going to live with it until I went to Warley and I was perusing the Attwood Aggregates stand. I was taken by the way real stone has variety of colour built in. I took a couple of bags, one greyish one for this layout and another more sandy coloured one for the Ashover layout. I took up the fresh ballast and, needless to say, it went down a lot easier. I don't know if it is because it is natural and not fabricated but it didn't shift when I applied the PVA.

Here's a couple of shots of the ballast including some taken using the macro lens on the phone:

 

The other big change that I decided to do at the same time was to replace the traverser. The traverser is a great bit of kit but as others will testify, modifying a layout once complete is rarely a wise move which leads to compromises and bodges. My bodge was that the traverser was 48" long but it had to fit into a 51" space. This necessitated some bridging timbers which, combined with some rather mediocre track laying my yours truly, meant that reliability was often an issue with derailments at the joins. Theoretically there really should have been no derailments on a layout that has not points!

If you have followed the blog from the beginning then you'll know that the driver for the traverser was that my original 4 road fiddle yard was connected via 9" radius curves which my newly built coaching stock woudl not go round. I still had that fiddle yard with its dowels to connect to the back of the layout so I dismantled it and used it's front and rear faces along with new sides and top to create the fiddle yard below. 

The yard now 5 roads with the centre one straight. What I have discovered with this layout is that running tends to consist of running the same train round several times whilst talking to visitors and only changing the train occasionally. Hence, the desire to have a straight track to limit the chance of derailments. Last year I invested in a Morley controller which can be seen in the photo below. There is a carefully cut hoel under the controller to take the cabling.

I then had to relay the track on the end boards since the levels had all changed. I took the opportunity to take this very slowly and carefully to ensure good transitions at the baseboard joins. I've found I can put up the main board, fiddle yard and one end board in the room which is how I have been working the last couple of weeks. First is a photo of the underside with the wiring in place and tag strips ready for the necessary point motor wiring. I need one more MP1 point motor and they are in short supply currently. For now it works fine without them.

Here is the completed fiddle yard complete with test track. since Melin Dolryhd only needs one controller it seemed sensible to use the second controller as a test track. The track is wired up and the buffer stops are my own 3D designed and printed coupling height gauges. 

So the engineering works are complete and the layout is ready to go to Maidenhead Show the first week of January. Actually I need to redo the curtains but they will get sorted the week before the show when the layout gets erected in the lounge for a quick check.

Relaying the track

After removing all the old ballast and track I then had to carefully remove any leftover impact adhesive from the old track. Once that was removed it was a case of smoothing it off with a wooden block and some medium grade sandpaper and it was ready to go.

Then it was a case of cutting up the sleepers with a razor saw. The early Cartwright and Russel book on the WLLR states that the sleepers were 6' x 9" x 4.5" at 3' spacing. That meant they should be 24mm on the model but as the track gauge is 1mm smaller than it should be, I decided to cut them to 23mm to keep the visible ratio correct. I used a razor saw and the wooden ones were easy but the fibreglas ones were hard work. Thankfully I only needed 6 - two at each end and two at the track join.

I then went over the trackbed and marked out 12mm spacing and a line of where the far rail should be. the expectation was that I would lay the far rail first and then lay the second rail spaced off that. The first rail was glued to the sleepers with impact adhesive, doing around 12 sleepers worth a time. Once glued and aligned it was weighted down with a metal block.

  After that the second rail could be glued down and spaced off the first rail using the 3 point gauges which were themselves held down with the metal block. Again, I could do about 12 sleepers at a time, and chose to leave the weight on for around an hour before moving to the next section.

Eventually, once it was all down, I just had to solder the track to the copper clad strip, reconnect the wires and run the first train.

 

The impact adhesive is a messy way of laying track and I am not sure I would continue to do it the same way for a larger layout. that said, it was all made a lot harder by being an afterthough and having to work within the fascia.

Onto the ballasting, a job that very few people like...

Time for a refresh

When I was exhibiting Melin Dolrhyd at the Welshpool Gala this year, I was very taken with Martyn Harrison's Castle Caereinion - see the post http://going-loco.blogspot.com/2022/09/return-to-welshpool.html What I really liked was his code 40 track and how it gave a much more light railway feel to the layout. Peco crazy track is excellent for building reliable track quickly but there is no getting away from how chunky it is.

There were really two questions to solve:

• Would my stock run over it?
• Was it worth the effort?

To satisfy the first question I had to first obtain some track and also obtain some track gauges. I ordered some code 40 rail from the 2mm Association and some track gauges from FastTracks in the U.S. I already had some suitable sleeper material from the 3mm Society. Once I had all the parts I built a short test track on foamboard. I already had a similar test track with Peco crazy track and was able to compare the two.

Peco on the left and scratchbuilt code 40 on the right. The difference between the two is huge! The track is simply stuck down to the wooden sleepers using impact adhesive. In real life the WLLR pinned the track down. There were no chairs. I was able to run all my stock along the track and none of them bounced on the sleepers, not even the oldest engine in the fleet.

That leaves the question of whether it is worth it. I came away from the Welshpool Gala energised by the show but dissatisfied with the operation of Melin Dolrhyd. The front of the layout was fine but the traverser was not as successful as I had expected. Much of this can be put down to having to make a 4ft traverser fit in a space which is just over 4' 3" long. There were packing pieces and packing pieces and the traverser never seemed to be level across all the tracks. Derailments were more frequent than they should have been for what is essentially a straight piece of track. The traverser is an excellent piece of kit but is overkill on Melin Dolrhyd and suffers from the curse of being a modification to an original design which didn't plan for it.

Taking on board my dissatisfaction with the running I decided it was worth the effort of replacing the track on the front along with replacing the traverser on the back. I'll cover the rear of the layout in another post.

Once the decision was made, I ordered some 1m lengths of track from C&L Finescale along with some roller gauge and they arrived on Friday. I popped across to the 3mm Society West Byfleet meeting on Saturday to pick up some deeper sleeper material which meant I had all the materials necessary to start, so start I did.

The ballast had been stuck down with the usual pva mix and the track itself was originally stuck down with impact adhesive. I used a dropper to wet the track and then worked away at the ballast with the screwdriver I use for almost every task where I don't use a scalpel. The track itself lifted relatively easily. The track bed is foamboard so I was worried that the card cover would soak and tear off, but it has stayed so far.

In fact it all came off quite easily with the exception of one of the baseboard joins where the card did tear off. In the next post I'll cover preparing it all and laying the track.

Photographing models

Recently I have found that I have struggled to take good photos of models. I would balance track on different boxes or mounting board but it was never a good experience. I can always use Melin Dolrhyd but the lighting isn't as far forward as it really needs to be for good photographs. I had a piece of track that originally was a DCC programming track set on something that could be fashioned into an embankment but it had no depth so something had to be done.

I found an offcut of MDF and started cutting out foamboard. I had an idea of a curve of track, set on an incline with a platform that could be used to host non track based products. The first picture shows the basic shape. A piece of wood is holding the stone walling join against the platform edge.

After that it was a case of laying track, putting some sandpaper down to represent the platform surface. Rummaging through the bits and pieces box I found some fencing from my first 009 layout and then I found a nameboard from the layout. I had to pause then as most work is done early morning and late night and I realised that static grass cannot be done in artificial light. It needs some natural, if grey, light to help with the colour blending. The second progress shows the progress after doing the grass.

After that it was onto the homeward stretch for a little bit of weathering and a hedge across the back to help with hiding the back. I also have a piece of backscene on a some floating mounting board that can go behind. The final picture is the finished product with Triumph on display with its nameplates that arrived from Narrow Planet recently.

All in all just a few hours work and now I have something readily available for photography.

A backscene at last

It's been a long time coming. Thoughts of how to create the backscene have been at the back of my mind since the start of the layout. I thought I had got enough depth to model the embankment behind the layout as the land rises quite steeply behind the mill. It turns out I don't have anywhere near enough space to model the rise.

Several options came to mind:

1. I toyed with the idea of extending out the back of the layout but that would have had to be supported somehow over the fiddle yard and would have had complications for fitting the layout into the car.
2. I thought about painting my own backscene. There is an excellent book on doing this, imaginatively titled "Creating a Backscene" and over on "Nick's Workshop Mutterings" you can see this being put into effect. I knew if I went down this route I'd still be talking about doing it in a year's time.
3. Cheat.

Cheating seemed to be the best option. There is a track that runs from the back of the mill down to where the water tower should be. I figured that I could make the ground rise behind that, as it does in real life, but plant a significant number of trees along the rear edge of the track that the back of the layout was obscured. The next task was to find a backscene. Eventually I settled on the Old Mill Town Pack B from id Backscenes. Howard Scenic Supplies quickly delivered so I decided the best mix and went to stick it on.

Bit of a disaster. There are two choices, self adhesive or not self adhesive. I chose the former out of some misguided idea that it would be easier. If you have a flat backscene that is not already on the layout then it must be fantastic but working on an already installed backscene working round some scenery was impossible. It's actually too sticky. It's either on or off and you cannot pull it back off to reposition. I ripped it all off in disgust and ordered the non sticky one.

Above is the result of applying the non self adhesive version with border adhesive. There is one slight crease over on the left hand side and the join between the two pieces goes right down through the buildings on the right but that will be hard to see as it is right behind the mill. There is work to do to blend in the sides where the embankment goes through the hillside!

It has raised another possibility, however. The existing scenery formation and the backscene do seem to blend reasonably well and I am toying with the idea of not using trees to hide the join but to accept the way it looks now and blend it in. It will mean losing any hillside behind the mill but looks like it will be a better compromise than the trees. A good friend is going to today supply me some polystyrene to fill in the remaining gap. Hopefully by the end of Christmas this will be in and a final decision can be made. It's going to be a compromise anyway so it's simply a case of determining the best compromise.

More baseboards built

Easter weekend is the perfect time to get some quality modelling time done. First you have to ensure all domestic duties are taken care of and then get up early and get started.

This weekend was earmarked to finish off the baseboards. Despite the ply being under heavy books in the lounge, some of the pieces still developed some horrible warps. I discarded the worst and managed to salvage enough to complete the two side extensions.

The two side pieces literally just contain the 180 degree bends to curve the track from the back onto the fiddle yard at the rear. They have 3 dowels for alignment each and also 3 bolts to hold the boards together.

Since taking the picture the top boards have been glued down and are under the significant weight of some railway books. Later this week I should be able to start track laying.

All change

How many modellers have announced they have had a change of heart and want to do something different before the current layout is finished? All of us! The change of heart was caused by an increasing disillusion with DCC which didn't run reliably for me. Others have had great success with it but all I got was sparking locos that kept tripping the short circuit protection. Additionally a change of house and change of job took place so 3+ years later, here we are.

There's been plenty of thinking in this time. Despite now having a much larger railway room to play with I knew that any layout would have to be relatively small to give me any chance of finishing it. I knew it would be 009 - I have made so many friends in the 009 Society and they are such an easygoing and helpful bunch of people.

Within 009 there is a huge range of prototypes. Having been a standard gauge modeller for so many years I have really struggled to mentally adjust to the really tiny stock that many lines had. Fortunately there are two lines that have some fairly chunky stock, the Welshpool & Llanfair Light Railway and the Leek & Manifold Light Railway. The other attraction for both these lines is that they have a interaction with standard gauge which widened the modelling possibilities.

I looked at both and settled on the Welshpool line as being the more interesting. I then did the standard thing and looked at the stations to see which could be modelled. In truth only Llanfair Caereinion can fit into a moderate space but it didn't give me what I wanted, the ability to sometimes watch trains go by.

In the end I flipped my thinking on it's head and made watching trains go by the major requirement. Looking along the line I came to Melin Dolrhyd, where the line weaves between the mill and the river. Could I model it? I don't know but I'm going to give it a try. I've built the main board as can be seen. The eagle eyed will notice it will be in cameo form.

Watch this space for another post. Hopefully in less than 3 year's time.