Subject:
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Re: X-10 Wireless Camera Train Car
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.trains
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Date:
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Sat, 23 Nov 2002 01:32:05 GMT
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Viewed:
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646 times
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In lugnet.trains, Ben Roller writes:
> Michael Hader built one of these in 2000 and brought it to a few NGLTC
> shows. Michael's car had headlights for the tunnels and was very functional
> in design. It didn't have a motor of its own, so it was either towed or
> pushed around the track.
>
> Here is his page about the Camera Car I:
> http://www.mhader.com/lego/train/camcar01/index.html
His looks like the exact same camera, but he actually put in some effort to
make it look like a train. Now I'm embarassed! Or I will be as soon as my
folder is moderated...
I didn't go for looks in mine, I wanted to shoot some quick video and then
pull that monster off the layout before anyone noticed. I also didn't worry
about the fact that my car is nearly 10 studs wide and severely top-heavy.
I might have to steal-er-borrow some ideas from Michael Hader's design. I
might pass on the lights, though; we don't have tunnels on our layout and
low lighting didn't seem to be the problem.
I did make mine with its own train engine (not shown in the picture) in case
we wanted to solo it around the layout. But I also had a spare non-powered
truck to slap on there so that we could inline the camera in a train. We
only ran it non-powered, pushed off the nose of another train last weekend.
> We too noticed that the interference was a lot worse than expected. At one
> of the shows, when we first hooked everything up, we realized that one of
> the n-scale layouts was using the same camera, also on the default
> frequency. Our receiver was pretty close to their layout, so their signal
> overpowered ours and we had to switch to the next (of 4) frequency on the
> camera.
>
> At the next show, imagine our surprise when we looked across the (huge) room
> and saw our Lego town on the TV screen of a G-Scale layout! They were very
> confused as to why their train was driving through a Lego town. :) I still
> can't believe that our signal overpowered theirs from across that room.
He with the stronger battery pack usually wins.
Also, the receiver antenna can be rotated to point toward the transmitter
and v/v to improve reception. So it is possible that their receiver was
pointed at your layout. (This didn't seem to matter all that much in my
living room, but my neighbors probably aren't running X-10 cams, either.)
> The moral of this story is: make sure you can still get to the frequency
> adjustment switch if you need to. Also, if more than 4 cameras are present,
> you may have problems.
>
> Ben Roller
Good point; I hadn't (intentionally) tried other camera channels. I
actually wasted about 15 minutes at home one night thinking that the camera
was dead before I figured out that I had switched the receiver to a
different channel. D-oh!
There were several other layouts running last weekend, so it is quite
possible that there were other X-10's in the building. I think our next
show is more of a holiday thing where we happen to be running a train layout
rather than a full-blown train show, so maybe I'll have better luck then.
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Message has 1 Reply:
Message is in Reply To:
 | | Re: X-10 Wireless Camera Train Car
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| (...) Michael Hader built one of these in 2000 and brought it to a few NGLTC shows. Michael's car had headlights for the tunnels and was very functional in design. It didn't have a motor of its own, so it was either towed or pushed around the track. (...) (22 years ago, 23-Nov-02, to lugnet.trains)
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