Power!

Now that I have the Betriebswerk in place, I am able to run the power cables along to where the control center is, and actually connect the Intellibox to the layout.


I fetched a loco to test that the track actually has power and it does... loco lights come on and the loco moves...

Power supplies

A quick job was to install the power supplies

On the right is a 3 x 100 Watt 16V AC power supply and the left is the PC power supply supplying 12V DC for lights etc.

Voltage visualization

I was connecting a Semaphore signal and I decided to try powering the light using the 5.1V DC supply and since it is an LED light I needed to get the polarity correct. My other color light signals also have LEDs and they all have their black lead with the diode connected to the common ground since the Viessmann signal modules produce a negative voltage relative to the common ground. My 5.15V DC supply is however positive relative to ground so the semaphore signal needed to have its yellow wire connected to ground and the brown lead with the diode connected to the positive power supply.

I realized that I needed to keep track of the various voltages I have available on my layout so I created this visualization.

DC power supply

Last march I talked about running a DC power bus around the layout in addition to the 16VAC and digital lines. An obvious source of clean DC power is an old PC power supply harvested from an old computer.

I found that other hobbyists (Example 1 and 2) are doing similar things with PC power supplies so this weekend I went ahead and built myself an interface between any PC power supply and my DC power bus.

Variable voltage power supply

I was recently given a whole pile of old electronic equipment from someone who worked on space rockets in the 1950s and 1960s. I decided to build myself a variable voltage DC power supply from the newly inherited stuff. It turned out to be quite an educational project and a lot of fun using various components so I thought I would share the project here along with my other train stuff. I often use it when testing lights etc on my workbench.