MERG Servo Tester / Controller Kit
This kit was obtained from the members only Kit Locker on the Model Electronic Railway Group website. The circuit controls an attached servo motor. I bought the kit to help me test servos.
1st attempt
I really screwed up with this one! All my fault, nothing at all to do with the quality of the kit.
One of the things I find really hard when building some veroboard based MERG kits is when there there is only a single diagram that shows the placing of components and one side of the board and where to break the tracks on the other side, as the following screenshot shows:
This circuit is © Davy Dick, April 2013. Parts of the circuit blurred for copyright reasons.
I find it almost impossible to turn the veroboard over and reverse the diagram in my head. And that's what happened; I got the track breaks in the wrong place on the veroboard. Well that screwed that! But at least I hadn't soldering anything yet.
2nd attempt
On to plan B. Since I had a circuit diagram and still had the all the components I decided that I could build the circuit on perfboard.
I quite carefully planned out the layout on the perfboard and then soldered up most of the components. But not enough to test anything. And then came Christmas (2025), followed by a series of illnesses after which I forgot all about the project.
Finally, almost six months later, I thought I'd better finish the project. The trouble was that I'd no recollection of what I'd done, so had to try to work it out. I took the plunge and attempted to finish the wiring. Guess what? It didn't work. After quite some time probing around with the multimeter I was no wiser. Patience was exhausted.
Giving up!
To be honest, it may not have been impossible to fix the project, but I had lost interest and the project went in the bin (metaphorically).
I spent a happy hour desoldering the circuit board and recovered and tested as many parts as possible. So something was recovered from the mess.
I was going to buy a replacement kit and try again. But, while poking around AliExpress, I stumbled across a more sophisticated ready made servo controller for about the same price! So that got ordered instead.