I've had the parts for the power controller kicking around the workshop for awhile. Being the last piece of infrastructure I decided to go ahead and build it.
Basically, I followed the steps presented in the following video. It's in Japanese, but it isn't hard to figure out what's going on. The device is simple and is based around a PWM unit for controlling power to the trolley.
As far as the guts of the thing are concerned the only major difference between theirs and mine is I use 2, 9v batteries connected in parallel for power. I was chatting about this project with a friend who's an expert in things electrical about my concern regarding draining the battery rather quickly given the grades on the layout. He suggested using two batteries in parallel to achieve longer life, so that's what I did. I haven't yet done a longevity test, that'll be for the winter.
The electrical access opening has always been a weak spot in the layout's design. By weak I mean visually weak even though it's structurally strong. It's just been a big opening for wiring access covered over by a piece of styrene velcroed to the layout with a power jack sticking out.
After some thought I decided to go with a homebrew '70s look by building out the opening with foam, blending it into the mountain with CelluClay, and velcroing on a control panel that reminded me of my '70s slot car setup, complete with advanced Dymo labelling technology :-)
The trolley runs quite smoothly and I'm happy with the controller's performance. So happy I'm thinking of building a second trolley for double the fun!
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