It's been a while since I wrote on the blog. I took a nice vacation to Estes Park. It was good to get away for a while.

One of my vacation projects was to stuff and solder components onto two of the grade crossing control boards, designed and sold by Bruce Chubb.

The grade crossing card is a circuit board that provides flasher control, gate control and user=selectable bell operation. The flashers feature “fad-in and fade-out” function to simulate realistically the incandescent lamp and the “soft start” circuit found on the prototype. The card has controls to adjust flasher brightness, gate speed and an adjustable delay between when the flashers start and gates begins their decent. A built-in DIP switch enables selecting between four different prototypical bell operational sequences. The grade bell sound is provided by an integrated sound IC pre-recorded from a prototype crossing bell. It's a pretty sweet piece of electronics.

Before my vacation, I had ordered most of the required components (those that I didn't already have in my surplus parts stash, and I spent an afternoon or two stuffing the boards and soldering. I still need a few oddball resistors to complete the boards, but they are nearly finished.

When finished, I intend to place one board at the existing crossing at the east end of Mokane, and the other board in St. Charles. It will add some nice animation and sound to the layout!

I'll update the block with more information about these cards later.