BCD Switch Control Circuit

[cteno4]

There is a great little circuit if you want to control your unitrak or finetrak points via spdt buttons in a control panel (ie two micro push buttons, one on each direction of a layout diagram). this very cool little design called the BCD circuit was created by George Stillwell. he will email you a pdf of the design if you want it (he is not putting it on the web yet as he wants to publish it and some places will not publish if its been posted on the web). yell and i can put you in touch with him if you are interested. if you do get it from him please dont pass it around and follow his wishes as he did this on his own and its nice of him to share it and his time with us.

this circuit does a capacitor discharge pulse (better for the coil) that you can then wire to momentary push buttons or spdt switches. the capacitor discarge is probably the best way to fire coils like this as its a very good momenary pulse that wont burn out the coil (if a controller hangs some or you use momentary dpdt switches alone and push too long) and is just what the coil wants to see to power it. also has options for adding led indicators to show current switch direction, do ladders, and also do default switch settings when you power up. You can create a circuit that will switch a ladder of points to go to one particular track in your yard!

i hope to build a few of these and experiment some this summer with these. very simple circuit that anyone with just a tad of electronics could assemble. he even has a design that you just wire up on a small screw terminal strip so no soldering or pc board, etc. someone on the ttrak board just offered to make some pc boards maybe for the circuit as well so it would be even easier to build these. I have looked at a few of these kinds of circuits in the past and most were overly complicated and many very specific in its use. BCD is nice in that its pretty simple, modular and flexible.

cheers,

jeff

[Tenorikuma]

I would be interested in such a circuit.

[alpineaustralia]

me too

[scott]

I'm clueless about electronics, but I'd be interested--sounds like a better solution for switch control for our layout.

[cteno4]

anyone interested pm me and ill put you in touch with the guy to get all the info from him. very nice chap.

cheers

jeff

[quinntopia]

I'm with Jeff.  I got the plan from Mr Stillwell about a year ago, and given various delays and a lot of back and forth questions with Mr Stilwell, I got it to work, and its fantastic.  Huge improvement over the blue switches!