#Familyfirst: How to make "super-fast Thomas", hod-rod Thomas the Train™*/Tank-Engine trackmaster toy" ...an off-topic post

Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/familyfirst-how-make-super-fast-thomas-hod-rod-trackmaster-jb-

Our train "goes up to 11..."

Really, just 9V instead of 3 😎


~

Today is Sunday, and it was also the last day of DerbyCon 7. I have no doubt at all that those of you lucky enough to be hundreds of miles away from home (instead of thousands!), or at home in the South, had a blast learning together there.

Maybe this should even inspire you to come home a bit early from the post-con party or if you're a local, to make that ever-so-important Sunday community event, that you're tempted to skip today! Who knows...

This will be the first & for the most part, last, off-topic post that I'll share here: I've started keeping the complete blog instead on blogger.com (https://cherokeejb.blogger.com), so I can keep LinkedIn focused on re-posts of work-related topics. So blogger or blog.infosecfeeds.org will include off-topic posts, such as me experimenting with basic "red-team tactics," going off-topic about something technical but not computer forensics or incident response-related, or something like today's family post.

(*) Disclaimer: We have no connection to Thomas, other than in our hearts, (originally created by Reverend Wilbert Awdry), and the rights are held not by us, or anyone linked below, but by various companies around the world for those toys, videos, etc.

So, one of the things I did last weekend, instead of finishing my post about open source forensic tools... or finishing up the first 3 videos from Security Bsides Springfield, which I really hope that I have time to get those out before the big-city-brother STL videos get out :)... was hang out with this gentleman, who wanted to make a Super-fast Thomas:

So this little man is watching my every move... here you can see us getting introspective about the meaning of life, in front of the Molecule Man, which is here in Berlin, right down the street from our current home.

Like many 3-4 year olds, my son loves Thomas the Train, and stacks them up just like I did the used, garage-sale, He-Man toys at that age, and as well, loves the ingenious Internet-based programs like Ryan's Toy Review, and LeoKimVideo. Leo is a special-effects expert from film, so he does often technical things, which one of his videos inspired us to make our very own Hot-rodded Thomas train (or as the German's would say "Tuning Thomas" :-) )

Instead of him watching me work on an IT-related project--which we'd normally try and talk about the write-up or some type of related multi-media project--this week, we chose carefully a train which to make super-fast aka, crank-up to 9 Volts instead of 3 Volts.

You can see here, our materials & tools, and you can even see that for maximum portability to your own project, we didn't even buy a 9V adapter, we hacked it out of another toy (of course, an hour later he wanted to play with that toy, but we'll fix them both again later, then!).

So as you see, we carefully de-soldered the 9V battery cable out of a remote control from another toy. We could have went to an amazing local store called Conrad, which will make any nerd teary-eyed that misses finding a Radio Shack in every small town of America, but we had to stick around the house for some other reasons.

I'll upload another day a video of how to test the polarity, and as well of the speedy final product, but for now you can see below the basics of the solder, see the image below: like Leokimvideo's instructions, in order to keep the switch active, we soldered some plain wire across one of the AAA battery ports, and then attached the female-negative port of the battery jack, to the negative port in the remaining side of the AAA-ports in the toy, and so on. The only major deviation from Leo's video we made, was that we just crammed the wires and sort-of taped them in the right position to come out the back, from inside, instead of drilling a hole in the back of the train.

I'll send this to my own dad later for corrections, but even though he and I soldered around a hundred of times together when I was a kid, I have no idea what battery jacks are called ("ports" seems very TCP/IP friendly!) You can also see another important principle here, of #familyfirst... even if you are not an expert, "just do it!" because you are an expert of everything to your kids.

Well... with that point being made, that's all there is to say! Thomas hauls !"§$% with his new 9V battery, which since AAA are 1.5 each, that is 3-times faster than his original kit! He can haul the battery in his wagon, as shown below. One caution... the cable has to be long enough so that the wagon, and all four of the trains' wheels are balanced for driving. Experiment before putting it all together.

I'll be back soon for more Forensic-oriented topics. For now, you'll no longer need a footprint to identify "who was that, that just blazed by!" It was Super-fast Thomas!!! Toot toot!

Happy Sunday.