Help needed for Wayintop sound module

Joe,

It looks like the letters at the top of the first three columns in the table correspond to the same letters in the inset photo at the upper right of the table.

A '0' in a column (A, B, or C) means that your remove the corresponding resistor (A, B, or C in the picture) from the board (unsolder it).

A '1' in a column means that you leave the corresponding resistor in place.

Is my opinion you're not really "adjusting" anything, simply removing some items (resistors) to choose the functionality selection (row) you want.

(The author of the table at WayinTop snuck a little binary numbering in there.  Most people probably would have used a check mark symbol in the columns where resistors should remain, and put nothing in the columns where resistors should be removed.)

Mike

The top of the instruction sheet says that the board comes wirh the default mode as "000". I interpret that to mean that "0" means with the resistor in place, and "1" with the resistor removed. What do you think?

Of course, I can just verify the behavior of the board against the table. It is going to behave as either "000" or "111". Then I can decide which resistor to remove.

I'm glad you spotted that.  I didn't.  That means that it's not only binary it's "active low" binary (0=present; 1=absent).

You're probably correct, however if you have no easy way to put one of those resistors back in place after you remove it you might want to proceed with caution before removing the first one.  They are quite tiny and are easily damaged with too much heat or too big a soldering iron.

Mike

Tiny for sure. Thanks for the help. Just wish the instructions had made clear what "adjusting" really meant.

Yup. Right there in the "fine print" at the bottom of your Mode Switching table.

Considering the permanent nature of the "adjustment", I think it wouldn't hurt to confirm the "default" settings by observing if the board behaves the way the table says it should, before making the alterations.

Agreed.

Got those resistors out with a soldering iron, and there's no putting them back; they broke as I pulled them off. But the unit works as described. Thanks. 😊

If for whatever reason you want to go back to another "mode" and you need some 3.3K "surface mount" resistors, I have thousands of them on a spool.  I will send you a few at no charge.  Presumably this is for an OGR related train application so I'm willing to pony up a 55 cent stamp as the admission price to hear your experience with this sound module.

That's very kind of you. I don't expect to go back to another configuration, so I won't be needing the resistor.

The unit is for the first unit of my modular subway layout, which has a streetscape on top of the tunnel section. I loaded a 2 minute segment of NYC street sounds onto the module, and the selected mode plays the clip continuously until the "play" button is pressed again.

I'm fashioning a box to mount it under the module.  If you would like to see more of the layout, there is a thread about it in the OGR Subway forum.

https://ogrforum.ogaugerr.com/...odular-subway-layout

So for anyone who may be interested, here's some pics of how the installation went. The sound quality is what you might expect of a small speaker, but placing it on a silicone gasket, inside a hollow plastic box (with holes drilled in the side as a speaker "grille"), and placing the speaker box under the layout, improved the sound substantially. The module uses 3 AA batteries, and I placed the battery box on top of the layout for ease of access. (That other box in the picture next to the battery box is for my tunnel lighting and signal batteries and switches).

The sound seems plenty loud, but my attic is not a noisy place, so it's hard to tell how it would sound at a show. The clip I've attached at the end is only 7 seconds because of the 5MB attachment limit, but the file is actually 2 minutes long and loops smoothly.  All in all, I'm happy with the result, and I thank the forum for the help provided.

I'll bet you the most enjoyable part of the project was drilling all those speaker holes. LOL!

When you say it "loops smoothly" is there any hiccup at all?  Did you use MP3 or WAV format for the audio file?  Did you have to "edit" the sound so that the ending and beginning sound play-well together?

Seamless looping of audio is a pet-peeve of mine with these low-cost sound modules.  I realize the looping only occurs every 2 minutes in your case.

This is my first experience with a sound module, so what seems OK to me may not be acceptable to others.  I can tell when the clip ends because there is a brief fading away of the sound, and then it starts again at the beginning of the clip.  The fade and restart is so quick it would be easy to miss if you were not looking for it.  The file came from Soundsnap, and is a 1.8MB MP3 file.