I purchased a Millhouse River Studio turntable in an auction of a layout that was being dismantled. Unfortunately, I did not get the indexing controller with the turntable. Millhouse charges $562 for their indexer which is outside my budget. I would like to know if any other turntable controllers will work with the Millhouse unit, e.g. the Walthers Cornerstone controller that sells for $50.
Well, the Millhouse River Studio turntable does not come cheap, so I am not surprised at the price of the indexing controller. Can you operate it manually? Even though my HO turntable had an indexing feature, I found it more efficient to operate manually.
Rich
Just as a note:
At 6:15 they note explicitly that their belt drive makes an indexer unnecessary.
My preliminary advice would be to provide a detent using a ‘ball’ type spring cabinet latch on one table end, and corresponding ‘pockets’ located in adjustable brackets so that the detenting can be fine-tuned to whatever track layout you have around the table. That puts the fine adjustment right out at the end of the table, which would otherwise require a very large diameter indexing ring under the layout somewhere to achieve – unsurprising it would be over $500.
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the challenge is not the controller but the means for determining position.
I believe the walthers controllers is intended for the walthers turntable that instead of a rail has a toothed ring around the periphery of the put and a bridge with a gear driven by a dc motor that drives that turns the bridge. There’s an encoder on the motor that can measure fraction of a motor shaft turn to accurately position the bridge. There’s also an LED sensor on the pit wall to zero the bridge position.
an older approach uses a slot detector and tags attached to the plate under the turtable to detect each track. the tag can be nudged for precise alignment
you would need to develop the software using such an approach
