Back in May I started looking into how I would operate the points on the OO9 gauge layout I'm intending to build. I made the decision to use a servo to throw each point and wrote two posts, one on the electronics and one on actually using the setup to throw an OO9 point. The one thing missing in both of those posts was an actual switch of any kind; I triggered the point throw by simply pulling one of the Arduino pins to ground with a short piece of wire which is clearly not a long term solution. The second of my railway related birthday presents (the first being the Heath Robinson book) has solved the problem in a very stylish fashion.
The solution to the problem is a Cobalt-S switch lever from DCCconcepts. Essentially this is a simple combination of a momentary switch and two SPDT switches, but it is packaged to look and work like an old fashioned point/signal lever. Of the nine wires I've currently just used two (one half of one SPDT) to trigger the electronics.
The angle of the video doesn't really show off the lever at its best although it does nicely show the lock mechanism. I've also yet to paint it or attach the rest of the detailing parts, but I think we can all agree that it's quite a stylish way to change the points. I'll need to pick up another one at some point as I'm planning two points on the layout but that is one more decision taken.
Back in May I started looking into how I would operate the points on the OO9 gauge layout I'm intending to build. I made the decision to use a servo to throw each point and wrote two posts, one on 
Great so it would work a semaphore signal as well.
ReplyDeleteYeah you could easily use it for semaphore signals as well. Given the switches it contains you could even do the points, signal, and track polarity all with a single switch. The full instructions show some really complex setups.
DeleteLevel crossing gates would be really good.
DeleteI think that's really neat!
ReplyDelete