Peter's Model Railroading | My Library | Magazine Authors
Magazine Articles By John S. Atkinson

Electronics Symposium

This column covers using the HT2014 LED flasher integrated circuit by Holtek, using a hall-effect sensor for turntable indexing, using an LM339 as a photocell detector, and a circuit design for automatically slowing an engine when it reaches the end of a spur.

Electronics Symposium

This month's column covers how to make a three-position semaphore control circuit, a how-to on using high-power AC wiring, and how to build a low-voltage power supply.

Electronics Symposium

This column covers building turnout-position indicator circuits, and using filter capacitors with low-voltage power supplies.

Exploring Hall-effect Sensors

Using rare-earth magnets in engines and cabooses to trigger a hall-effect sensor to activate circuitry. An example given is an automated crossing gate system.

Fun with Photocells

The author presents several circuit schematics, such as a photocell LED driver, a photocell detector, a hidden fouling point detector, and driving other devices.

Fun with Phototransistors

How to use phototransistors in model railroading applications.

Symposium on Electronics

This installment covers a reverse polarity detector, which can be used to indicate reverse polarity situations in a blocked layout, or to drive scale signals.

Symposium on Electronics

This month's column covers correcting errors in the February's issues' reverse polarity detector, and the traffic light controller circuit.

Symposium on Electronics

Includes 12-volt lamp driver circuit, a 12-volt traffic light interface, a night flasher, audio amplifier and noise generator, a pseudo-random-sequence generator, and an oscillator circuit.

Symposium on Electronics

This installment covers building repeater relays for throwing many points in complex tracks like double crossovers with one switch, creating a Mars light flasher, using the random-sequence generator from the February issue of this magazine to drive circuits for a telegraph sound module, a realistic flickering fire module, diesel sound, creating random on/off lights for residential homes, and traffic light synchronization.

Symposium on Electronics

Using RS-232 connectors to connect wiring between modules. Also discussed is the 555 integrated-circuit and how to use it to build a mechanical refrigerator car sound, a voltage divider, and a reed-switch turn-off delay.

Symposium on Electronics

This column covers the 741 op-amp. Included design diagrams include both the inverting and non-inverting amp, a follower amp, a summing amp, a difference amp, a decoupling amp, a tone generator, and a tone adder. The last two can be used to simulate diesel engine horns, which are usually the combination of a couple of individual notes.

Symposium on Electronics

This column covers the LM386 and LM383 audio amplifiers, and the LM317 and LM337 voltage regulators. Also included is a "laboratory" power supply.

Symposium on Electronics

This month's column covers "snubber diode" (to prevent electronics from being damaged by the switching of a relay), and full discussion of the now-extinct LM3909 integrated-circuit chip that made building LED flasher trivial. There is also a full discussion of how Transistor-Transistor Logic works (TTL). IC codes are explained as well.

Using Sound Chips on Your Layout

Describes how to use the Radio Shack 276-1325 ISD1000A voice record-and-playback integrated circuit.