At breakfast this morning the Boy asked, “Dad, can we fix Gordon today?” Gordon, from Thomas and Friends, didn’t work when the trains were rediscovered. So today, we took him apart to diagnose the problem. He simply wouldn’t run. Turns out the fix was easy: the contact leafs that rub against the drive wheels to pick up power needed a little extra bending to make a low resistance connection. Once we did that, we also had to run him out a little - I suppose the lubricant in the gear box needed to be redistributed. That and little machine oil and he was up and going. The Boy wanted to put this on the blog. Here is a picture of Gordon in a state of disassembly.
Last time, I was setting up a DCC++ base station to control our one DCC locomotive. Since then, I installed JMRI on a netbook running Xubuntu to have some better control. JMRI is a Java-based train control system that supports DCC++ for output. My netbook was running XP and wouldn't support a recent JMRI version, so I installed Xubuntu as a dual boot. JMRI installation on Xubuntu was pretty straightforward and I also have it auto-starting now on login. It has a server for network control, to which an iOS app called WiThrottle (free version) can connect. Installed that on an iPad and now can control the locomotive over wifi.
Not a bad outcome.
The next challenge is sound on board.
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