Well, another interesting and 'interesting' weekend out with The Back End. We had so many conversations with people who wanted to know about the design, construction and the vegitation of the layout that I had a very sore throat by last night. We had people who asked how to build the vegetation who went and bought some of the materials, came back to check that they had got the right stuff and then asked further questions. Talking to people and passing on knowledge at exhibitions is what this layout is about, as is having fun.
The 'interesting' side of it came about through a situation I have seen developing over recent years. I had also had a guest operator who had never played with the train set or the operating system. Firstly Touchcab is a brilliant way of operating a DCC layout and is considered so good that Lenz recuited the designer to develop a similar system for them; the HMI is almost exactly like Touchcab but on a bespoke handset. Our operating system has served Laramie, Aberbeeg and The Back End at a long and boring list of shows and we have never experienced this problem.
Firstly, my Iphone received an update on Thursday and initially behaved like a dog. When the problem started on Saturday I suspected the phone and switched to the old Iphone 5 that is only used for operating the layout ; it has the benefit of no attention from Apple for many years. The problem still occured but less often. So, not the phones but probably an environmental problem. Taking a look at the networks available I counted 16 in the hall. We are in a metal box with lots of strange angles so electro-nagnetic radiation will be bouncing around at all sort of crazy angles unable to escape from the hall. We were being jammed! (I have an ancient qualification in electronic warfare, so I have seen this sort of thing before). There seemed to be little that I could do.
Late afternoon I had an intersting conversation with a chap about the problem. He pulled out his Samsung phone and ran a WiFi analysis app. I now discovered that there are 15 WiFi channels (who knew!) and that we were sharing channel 1 with three other systems. I also learnt that I should be able to switch the channel our router operates on. On Saturday evening I downloaded an app from the router manufacturer onto my Ipad and set to it on Sunday morning. The app refused to recognise the router, manually inputing the SSID or IP of the router also failed. So we were stuffed.
Now I am home one of the slow time jobs is to see what I can do to have a router that I can control at exhibitions. Touchcab is too good to not use. An altenative is to remove the fuses on all the other WiFis in the hall
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Matt,
I haven't done much in the press about The Back End, well, to be accurate I have done nothing. I could start a thread, if there is a demand, but there a few photos of the build. (Sorry if your search became 'interesting'.
)
Simon