The last installment in this series ( LEDs 102 - Use On Board Trains ) ended with a few thoughts about turning battery powered LEDs on and off. In this article I would like to explore several options for turning LEDs, and other things on your railroad, on and off. A simple on/off toggle switch meets the first and last requirement and, depending on
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where you put it, the other two as well. I have mounted small toggle switches under cars and tenders to do a variety of things and find them to be a good solution so long as I can remember where they are located under the car! The switch pictured here is inside of a tool box on a tender. A reed switch is a magnetically activated switch that is frequently used in model railroad applications. They are also commonly used to trigger burglar alarms when a window or door is opened. Most are composed of a small glass tube that contains two small magnetized contacts that normally do not touch. This makes most reed switches Normally Open, sometimes referred to as NO as opposed to NC switches which are Normally Closed. When a magnet is brought near the switch the two contacts come together and the switch closes. When the magnet is removed the contacts spring apart and the circuit opens. If you would like more information on reed switches they were covered in some detail in my article Garden Railway Sensors - Part 1 As I mentioned in the last article you can use one of these common reed switches to turn LEDs on and off by gluing the reed switch to the inside of the roof of a car. Placing a small magnet on the top of the car will turn the LEDs on and they will go off when it is removed. As you can imagine this presents a few problems. You have to find a place where the magnet is not likely to fall off as the train moves around the...
This project fits more for custom made battery casing that can have more space to hide things inside. This switch with few alterations can be used for any other project as well but is designed based on e-bike needs! This project use a clever functionality of....
The circuit described here uses ultrasonic oscillations and operates based on the propagation velocity of these oscillations in the air. Thus, we can easily determine the distance of two points if the time within which the wave travels this distance is....
Sometimes the precious metals are hidden too deep and are not detected except with complicated devices. In many cases, however, small pieces of precious metal buried near the surface can be detected by relatively simple means. Everyone is very attractive to....
Many times for various reasons we forget or can not water the plants that we have in our homes. And many humidity sensors units just notify us with a beeping sound or with a flashing light, that the pot needs watering. But what if we are away from home? This....
The principle behind a metal detector is really very simple. Proof of this is the circuit that follows, in which it proves that the construction of a metal detector can be done in the minute, with few components that we find very easily everywhere. With the....
The sub-harmonic bass generator is a sound producing unit for guitars. The sound it produces looks very much like that of the bass guitar. The octave generator is sometimes quite unusual since it does not produce any of the usual ways of coloring the sound,....
In the past the sounding (sea bottom measurement) was done with the "bullet", that is, with a heavy lead object that the seamen plucked into the sea hung from a calibrated rope. As soon as the "bullet" reached the bottom, the depth appeared directly from the....
This Amplifier was designed to have the following specifications: Distortion less than 0.1% at full power of 100W even at 20KHz. Power has to be attributed to an extended bandwidth. The output transistors must be protected against short circuits. The power....
A series of LEDs serve to alert the gardener when plants need water. Using two conventional digital integrated LEDs and a series of LEDs, we make a very useful device for gardening. The device detects the amount of water in the pot and alerts the grower.....
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