if you automate your turnouts on your model railroad chances are you're going
to want to use one of these two switch motors here the cobalt or the tortoise
and I'm going to show you the differences in them the similarities in
them and what and you know I'm gonna tell you what I think about it so here
we go I'm Tom Kvichak and this is Toms Trains and Things this channel was
created to help other modelers who are in need of guidance in pursuing their
dream of building a model railroad and if you have turnouts on there and you
want to automate it you have a couple of choices now there's more choices than
the tortoise and the cobalt but I'm going to discuss the differences and the
similarities of the two right here now as you could see the cobalt is just a
little bit smaller than the tortoise in every dimension Dan right there and then
this I and I accidentally drilled the hole in the top of my last tortoise but
anyway don't do this at home but luckily it didn't go all the way through with
the the cobalt switch machine you get this little cushion here and you could
also use this as a template for your holes when you're mounting it underneath
your layout it's just a foam rubber that has adhesive on both sides now with the
tortoise you know you get a template that's printed out on the page but you
could make your own template and they also sell a template but I just took
some cyrene and I traced out the the the holes and I cut it into the styrene and
what I do is right now I have it it's all dirty right now but you could I have
the transfer tape on it and so you could just take that off and put a new
transfer tape on it and you mount it up on the bottom of your layout and I'll do
I'll do a demonstration on the mounting of the switch
in another video but we're just showing we're just going to compare these right
here okay a few things that I've seen on the cobalt now I don't have any of these
mounted on my layout as yet and in another video I'm going to show you how
to mount this one and I'm going to show you how to mount the tortoise which
machine but on the Cobalt Classic Omega you have two different ways that you
could mount it the conventional way where you can mount
it where your wire comes up through or you could mount it on its side also on
the Cobalt you have the little board on there that
sticks out okay you could you have a little switch on it where you could
adjust if you're using anywhere from six to 12 volts or 12 volts up to 18 volts
you could switch it if you're using larger scales and also you have the push
in to hook up your wires now if you don't like soldering this is a good
thing to have right here because all you have to do is push the wire in hold back
on the little clip and push the wire in and you're good to go but I have this
one pinned so I'm not sure it says don't ten it but there it is it's good and
tight alright and that's all you have to do to connect them they're clearly
marked on here and also on the bottom the only thing that I don't like about
it is I've been in electronics on my life and electrical work and you have a
wiring diagram and on a wiring diagram if you have a switch you have a common a
normally open and a normally closed on here it says common left and right the
middle user manual which you get with the cobalt it will tell you right over
here for the common turn out frog right rail left rail and in common left
and right well that doesn't tell you if it's normally open or normally closed
that's the problem I have with this you just have to figure it out by using a
meter on it to say which one it is and they don't really give you any wiring
diagram anywhere they just give you the the wires coming out and tell you what
it is they don't show you a switch where there is a switch and what I had an
issue with on here also was on pin number three okay it says switch use
this wire for LED signals or system feedback okay but I had to figure it out
myself what how to use it okay nowhere in here
or on the website they tell you how to use it for somebody that isn't versed in
electrical work or electronics or doesn't know anything about electrical
will have an issue with this right here they're going to have to they're gonna
have to go on a YouTube video and find out how to do it and that's what we're
going to show you how to do right here the output of pin number three is half
of what the input is so if you're using twelve volts on pin 1 and 2 to operate
the the Kobalt switch machine the output on pin number three is going to be half
of that and I'm going to show you a little demonstration here where I used
LEDs in between 1 2 and 3 to get you give you a green and red indication
showing you which direction the switch machine is in you could also do that on
pin number one there's many ways that you could do it it and you could do it
that way also on the tortoise so that's my observation of the Cobalt
and I'll give you a little bit more when I have it hooked up down below now on
the tortoise which machine okay it's a lot larger you'd have the edge of
a circuit board there are no connectors on it you could solver your wires
directly on the circuit board there's a hole in each one and you could wire it
in or you can buy various connectors for it I have these right here I got these
at Bill's Train Track and they're inexpensive they're not made especially
for tortoise there a generic plug for any end card with eight pins on it and
what I do on there is I take a little as you can see on the edges there I put a
little toothpick on the side so the switch machine is lined up properly
because the connector is a little bit bigger and you could slide it back and
forth so I always put it and if you like you could put it on here put a toothpick
on either side of that on here you have a wiring diagram they show you how to
bend the wire they give you a diagram on how to bend the wire and where to bend
it they also give you a wiring diagram for everything on here and show you how
to hook it up let's hook these things up and take a look at them down on my bench
right here I got LEDs I got all kind of
goofy-looking stuff hooked up to it so you could see it in operation I'll have
both of them running together I'm gonna do a little demonstration right here and
let me find a something to point with so I could show you what's going on here I
have both the Cobalt and the tortoise hooked up to 12 volts
here's the negative and here's the positive 12 volts I have it going
through the switch so I could reverse it I have the power leads coming over here
and from here going directly to the tortoise okay now I have a jumper over
here and you can see I have two diodes right here the
or LEDs right there in red in the green this is coming off of pin three so
whatever you see on here is coming off of pin three which is half the voltage
of what's going in so twelve volt is going in on the black and white wires on
pin one and two and your LED signal from pin number three on this one will light
up these two LEDs right here now these two square LEDs that I have right here I
have on the 12 volt directly and then I have the resistor on there and I have
them reversed so whenever it's in one direction you have one lit up in the
other direction that the other one's lit up everything is equal you got 12 volts
one in the only thing on this one on the cobalt you have six volts coming out to
power these two LEDs so let me turn the power supply on and then you can see
that you have those lights lit up right there these two are in the same
direction and I'll reverse them right here and you see that the LEDs reversed
and you can see that the tortoise switch machine goes just a little bit faster
okay I'm going to take these two LEDs on from here so there's nothing interfering
with the signal wire to see if still the tortoise goes faster
yes and this and the tortoise still goes faster I'll disconnect the tortoise and
we'll listen to the sound on this one here now I'm sure once you get the the
the rubber on it and you know this is what they give you to deaden the sound
of it that I'm sure that once you have it mounted it's not going to make as
much noise but right out of the box and with nothing attached it's you know it's
pretty loud right there but anyway let me disconnect the I'll just disconnect
one of them so you can hear the difference now on the tortoise it's not
as loud as the cobalt in my opinion I like the tortoise which machine over the
cobalt even though the cobalt is much smaller
it is noisier the they added an extra set of gear reduction in there so you
cannot Center this when you're installing it and on the tortoise you
can see how easy it is to adjust it in the center when you're installing it and
I'll show you that on the next video the cobalt stall amperage is 30 milliamps
where the tortoise is 16 milliamps therefore you could only use half as
many on a power supply as you can on the tortoise and another thing I checked on
their website and there is no attachments that goes with this one this
is the Cobalt Classic Omega so if you have a situation where you can't mount
this directly underneath a turnout you're gonna run into a problem where
you're gonna have to make up your own jig tortoise has
the an attachment remote Remote Tortoise Mount and that also will allow
you to operate two turnouts with one switch machine which you can't do with
this unless you make your own Jake so you be the judge of it I'm a little bit
biased because I have 18 of these actually 17 of these installed I have
one more to go and I'll put it on one of the turnouts
where I don't have a switch machine now going into one of the industries if if
you'd like ease of putting your wires on there I would say go for this this is
that seems to be the only advantage of this because it's more expensive than
the tortoise it comes from Australia if you need to send it out for repairs you
got to send it to Australia this you send it to Illinois so I'll let you
decide we have some more videos coming out with LEDs and I'm going to show you
on the breadboard how to hook them up so you could light your buildings or any
other effect on your model railroad so take a look for them they're coming up
in the future once we get back on schedule I'll have three videos up every
week like I did before so take a look for them they'll be here if you would
like to see more videos like this go ahead and hit that subscribe button and
while you're at it and that'll notify you whenever I have a new video coming
out check out my playlist check out my patreon page patreon.com/lenguin
and support this channel thank you we'll have some more videos coming out in the
near future like I said before I don't know exactly
when they'll be but we'll get back on the schedule like we did before pre
Irma okay and we'll see ya!
Không có nhận xét nào:
Đăng nhận xét