October 14John Purbrick installed a pair of trees near a siding he has been working on for quite a while. With the installation of these trees, salvaged from the old layout, the total number of trees on the layout has now reached 10. October 18The club was pleasantly surprised to get a visit from James, who hasn’t been seen for a while, having apparently succumbed to the pressures of real life. He examined the club’s PIC programmer and pronounced it broken without identifying a specific cause or suggesting a solution. There was also some discussion of how DCC might be added to the system. In principle, this is easy: system 3 block cards include a two-pin header which can be connected to a DCC booster. The question to be answered was whether the built in occupancy detection circuit can work with DCC, and apparently it can. This should make it possible to have the system run both DC and DCC trains at the same time, which would be a unique capability.October 21Quentin and Tom tried to figure out the bizarre behavior of a pair of prototyping boards, and identified a short circuit on one and missing components on the other. Quentin is working to build a controller for lighting in and around scenery (streetlights, traffic signals, building lights, etc.) Genya worked out some obscure bugs in the server code, and, we hope, fixed them.October 25Lots of soda showed up in the club room, thanks to the combined efforts of Andy, Alvar and Tom, so we are now fully stocked on everything for once. Tom gave serious thought to updating the web page status reports before deciding not to and fixing the brakes on his bike instead. As a result, it should be expected that any status reports for October will be more fabricated than usual. John McNamara worked on the left side of the mountain scene. Andy worked on scenery in Middle heights. Tom did a bit of trackwork in support of Andy’s project. October 28Adam worked on rocks in the mountain scene. He is currently working out how to paint and otherwise complete the rocks, as well as what to do in the areas where there are no rocks. Genya worked on system 3 software, trying to squish smoe bugs that show up in unusual circumstances. Tom put down ballast on a short stretch of track in Middle Heights, updated the web page and planned a t-shirt order.