Stewart Hobbies F7's


So if you had your druthers, which would you prefer? A louder chuff under load or a change in sound?
I know a guy who designs the sound chips for a manufacturer and I'll talk to him and see what's in the works. Knowing what I do about what he does, I have an idea how what you want can be accomplished, but I'll find out what's up.
On the other hand, you may have just helped design a part of the next generation sound chip. :)
 
> So if you had your druthers

What's a druthers and why would I want one? (Sorry, couldn't resist...)

> which would you prefer? A louder chuff
> under load or a change in sound?

I'm not sure what the difference between those two choices is...
Louder chuff meaning purely volume while change in sound means a change in the "crispness" of the chuff?

I'd say to go with volume, since I can't think of any easy way to determine how "sharp" the exhaust should be. The reverser determines that on the real thing but there's no similiar comparision on the model. Load relates, but not entirely. You can have different throttle and reverse setting for the same load.

I don't know, maybe you can do it by comparing both the load and speed, compared to some theoretical values, but that would take some more thought/design...

> On the other hand, you may have just helped design
> a part of the next generation sound chip. :)

That would be cool, but I can't believe I'd be the first to think of this...
 
PS - Another reason to concentrate on the volume portion. Given the small speakers in model installations, the changes in "bark" may well be too subtle to easily detect. That's especially true at the speeds models tend to operate at, which tends to blur the exhaust in any case.
 
After reading the post about the Tsunami chip it sounds like somebody did think of it first :) Oh well, I'll still talk to the guy and see what I can find out (and what I can leak).

Since we drifted off topic here, let's go hog wild.
Bob, do you have as much range of cutoff in the geared locomotives as you have on regular steam? I know that technically you would since the reverser is infinitely variable, but a shorter throw would make it less adjustable. Hmm the more I type here the more I think there might be no difference but I thought at first that a Shay would spend more time in the power end of the stroke and wouldn't need as much tweaking. Just curious.
 
The guy you probably want to talk to is Steve Dominguez at Soundtraxx; he's the head guy there who does a lot of the designing. They're usually open to suggestions; I might have gotten him to set up the ability for an articulated to go out of sync if the decoder is for an articulated. I know when I talked to him at the National Train Show last summer, he thought about it for a bit, then said, Yeah, that should be do-able, and put a note into his Palm Pilot....

:D

Kennedy
 
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