I know, it’s been some 18 months since I posted any update. Turns out, if you want to get nothing done on your layout, start a model railroad company. The RasPi Zero W at the core of Iowa Scaled’s wifi receiver for the ProtoThrottle has been basically unobtainium for the past two years, so I started redesigning the receiver last summer. That involved hardware design, learning a whole new microcontroller and toolchain (the ESP32), and rewriting the whole thing from scratch – twice. Fortunately that long endeavor is at an end and finally to market, so hopefully I’ll have a little more time back. On the other hand, I really hate my day job these days and would like to have ISE become my full time income, and that’s going to take a lot more new products that sell a whole lot better in order to replace the paycheck that my professional job provides.

And if that’s not enough, I got suckered into being an assistant editor for Drip Points, which is one of the two main magazines of insulator collectors. Yes, I have hobbies beyond railroads, and putting out a professional, full-color magazine every other month takes a bit of time.

Basically, been a bit burned out for the last year. My hope is to get back to scenery this fall. I figure if I can get some hard shell on, then I can start weathering track, painting backdrops and fascia, and then start building the hundred trillion trees I’m going to need.