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Wiring Atlas switch machines?
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<p>Chessie, I think this is what you are also asking. Now that you have the idea of making or buying a capacitor discharge circuit, you wanted to see how to wire up the Atlas switch controllers to the wires coming from the Atlas snap switch machines.</p> <p>Below are photos of one of my control boxes. Even if just using a few switches, the connections pattern is the same of course.</p> <p><img src="http://i168.photobucket.com/albums/u172/dcrane_2007/DSC02651copy.jpg" style="max-width: 550px;" border="0" /></p> <p>1. (Blue) Wires from one terminal of the control (doesn't matter which) are connected to one of the leads coming in from the cap. discharge (doesn't matter which) Here you can see the controls are made with connectors to make gang connections.</p> <p>2 (Red) Wires from the other terminal of the control are connected to the remaining input lead from the cap discharge.</p> <p>3. Wires from each switch side of the controller are run on out to the layout to connect with the red and green wires coming from the Atlas switch machines. It is best to use red and green wire to keep colours matched.</p> <p>4. (Black) common wire does not need to go out to each machine. This is connected to a single terminal block in this control box and a single black common wire comes in from the layout. To this latter single wire, all the black common wires from the individual switch machines are connected somewhere on the layout through several other terminal strips. In other words, you do not need to run three wires from every switch machine back to the control area....just the red and green and gang up the common black out on the layout. This makes wiring a little simpler.</p> <p> </p> <p>UNDERSIDE</p> <p><img src="http://i168.photobucket.com/albums/u172/dcrane_2007/DSC02646copy.jpg" style="max-width: 550px;" border="0" /></p> <p>1. Three wires from each control. Each black one goes to one side of terminal strip which has been modified with copper wire "bridges" to make each segment live.</p> <p>2. Positive and negative inputs from the cap discharge unit. Mine is 16 VAC...same as on my Digitrax Zephyr throttle control. You need about this much power. Too little won't throw the machines out on the switches.....and the cap discharge protects you from too much continuous power appication from sticky controls on this panel (In all my years I had only one stick previously to using the cap discharge, however.)</p> <p>One wire goes to the left side of the terminal strip shown. To the other side of the strip shown run all the common black wires from the controllers on the topside. You can double them up on the right side of course if you need to.</p> <p>The other wire from the cap discharge goes to a terminal strip (not shown on the other side of this central wood bar). To this strip run the power wires from the sides of the controllers.....item 4</p> <p>3. These strips I use throughout the layout. Elsewhere I use them to gang up the common wire and to attach the very small gauge Atlas switch motor wires to heavier wires running back to this control box and entering as shown. Note there is only one black wire entering with the bundle.</p> <p>Hope this helps.....but if you knew all this, maybe it will help someone. It's not rocket science, but I always like to see pics. My boxes are very rudimentary but it was the way I started out...a few at a time, and kept expanding the layout instead of stopping and rebuilding with a state of the art control area, indicator lights etc. etc. Oh well.</p> <p> </p> <p> </p> <p> </p>
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