http://www.tamvalleydepot.com/products/quadservodecoder.html
The TAM Valley Quad servo controller
Other alternatives were offers from Hans Deloof, his has loconet support but you have to build the whole unit yourself (as in - buy the parts and solder it up)
or Team Digital's SMC4 Servo. Which is nice but expensive.
Why did I choose TAM?
Price
expandability - it has pins to allow daughter cards
already built ! Hans looked more impressive but I would have had to make it myself and I didn't feel confident of my soldering skills
Duncan from TAM Valley is very customer focused and is a great resource for questions. He's indicated that he's working on a LOCOnet daughter card which would be perfect
Until the loconet daughter card comes into being, I will have no direct feedback from my switches meaning my computer won't know if they're thrown or straight. I ordered the manual push buttons so I'll visually see which way they are but I can't write some automated train programs into my JMRI computer quite yet.
SERVO's
So although TAM Valley sells servo's for 4.5 USD, I choose to go right to the source of cheap servo's - Hobby King in Hong Kong. These guys are awesome, $2.49 for a good cheap servo with multiple arm types, 9g of power and shipping was resonable.
Now the problem is figuring out how to mount them and get my atlas switches thrown. I think this is the worst part of installation, and out of 3 installs, I've got 2 working well but I've got some ideas !! I think the problem is the depth of the tube and how I've bent the fulcrum wire, blah blah blah.
I'll put some pictures up once I have something worth showing. Until then, suffice it to say, it looks bad.
In the immortal words of Boxer (the horse) from Animal Farm
"I will work harder !"
of course, he ended up being sold to the glue factory to pay for a case of whiskey for the Pigs. mmmmm, whiskey.
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