An ECOS Update, A Camera Car, and my Class 37 Lives!

Reports of the death of my My British Rail Class 37 were apparently exaggerated.  I looked up my repair options yesterday and was preparing to ship this engine back to England but decided to tinker with it one last time.  I found the power connection between the PC board and the chassis (it's built North American style, where the weight is split down the center and carries the current!) and poked at it and voila!  All better!

I'm very pleased to have this back in operation again.  Also, if you happen to find yourself in York, I can thoroughly recommend the Monk Bar Model Shop, as it made me sorely miss the great hobby shops I grew up with.  The staff really know their stuff.


Camera Car A few weeks ago I bought a WiFi camera and USB receiver on eBay, like this:.  

I cannot recommend it, not yet at least.  The software it comes with is beyond poor, but it does work. I'll be posting a video made with this toy soon and you can judge for yourself.

On my first attempt to use it I found it the camera made the car I butchered for it top heavy- it tipped in corners, even at very low speed.  On straights it also wobbled something terrible.  Granted, my effort (seen below) was rather crude, but I did learn from the experience.

The battery was to help balance the weight on the car.  Didn't work well.

The key seemed to be stability and size.  Out of the box it's a little big for n scale so I knew I'd need to take it apart and loose the housing.  I bought a North American well style cargo container car to use as a new platform, the cheapest model I could find of one of these:

The beauty of a well car is that it has storage space very low to ground, and so a very low center of gravity.  I ripped off all of the details, which were few, and using model ship strip wood built a wooden platform in the bottom and then added a layer of lead fishing weights and solder as balast, and then capped that with another layer of wood.   I then removed the camera from it's case, mounted the guts to the well and the lens to front of the car and I had a super stable camera platform.  It''s not pretty, but it does the job.

What's the video quality like? Well, I'll edit something nice together sooner or later.  The raw feed is pretty iffy and the included software is just crap.

Live from the tracks!

In tunnels the WiFi signal drops out so I plan to look at extending the antenna.  I think I can make a long one and have it spread over several cars.  More on this in future posts.

ECOS 50200 v3.4.3

A few weeks ago ESU released a minor update for the ECOS.  It's mainly bug fixes, but there are a few tweaks I really like.  First, they have added a save option in one of the config screens, which means you no longer have to hold down the stop button to power cycle the unit for force a store.  Also, when connected with a browser you can reset the ECOS remotely, so if you are uploading train icons you can cycle the ECOS without having to power down, which really speeds things up.   The only other big new add for me was the addition of a track crossing icon for the mapping mode.

And with the above goodness comes the not so good.  Updating will also wipe out your user defined locomotive images, all your switches, and your layout map.  ESU gives you a convenient way to back these up via HTTP but if you are really excited about new firmware like say, me, you may forget to do this.  Happily I'm now largely controlling everything from the PC and Train Controller anyhow, so it was just a matter of restoring my icons.

ESU hosts a large library of icons for the ECOS, but they rarely seem to have just what I want.  I'm a bit fussy I guess, so I want all mine to be in about the same scale, all facing the same way, and all with a background matching the system color.  For these reasons I've spent many hours photoshopping exactly the icons I want.  Perhaps they are of some value to a few of you, I'll put them at the end of this post.