Playing with sounds and textures on vR loco's

Please move this to a different forum is this is the wrong one.

A little info about me... i am on the Autistic spectrum, and possibly have Bi-Polar or something similar, this makes me become very obscessed with things...
Train Simulator and Omsi have been some of my long running obscessions.
Back in 2012 i drove 1800 miles from England to Germany to buy the driving desk out of a Wittenberger Stuerwagen:

As well as parts from a MAN NG272 bus cab,

I also added a detour to Berlin to ride on the route 137, which was the route 92 as featured in Omsi pre 1990..
This was the time that lived in Germany, from age 5 to 12 (1983 t0 1990) as my dad was in the RAF... hence my fascination for German things i think.

I proceded to annoy my then partner by basically building a replica bus cab in my living room, we split up before i got to building the stuerwagen cab next to it, and shortly after things went very bad in my life, so i had to stop all simulator building work.

Hopefully things are almost sorted after over 3 years of hell, and so i am slowly getting back into the simulators.

My favourite loco's to drive are the ones made by VirtualRailroads, their expert line units really are amazing and nice to drive, but me being me, i saw some little improvements i could make to them, so here is what i have done so far:

I believe that the makers of vR loco's prefer people not to publish mods made to their stuff, i'm not sure anything i modify will be wanted by other people anway,
So i'm really just modifying my vR loco's, cariages and steuerwagens for my self and showing here what i've done.. maybe to give others inspiration to modify things.

I must admit that i am very very new to this, i started off by modifying the inputmapper files 3 weeks ago, so all my vR units have the same key map between them.

I then moved on to adding sounds to things that have none, like the 'Bremse Loesen' Switch, this switch is working in most vR trains.... it releases the brakes... but it is silent, not even a click...

so i added a click and a hiss when it's operated so simulate the sound of the brakes being released:

When i figure the sound programming structure out better, i will make it so the release hiss only happens when the brake pipe pressure is below 5 bar.. this is not needed on all loco's i've discovered, some do have the hiss tied to the pressure gauge, but still no switch click.

Next i made up key assignments for the EBuLa's buttons so i don't have to use the mouse to operate it (Shift + Control Delete turns in on and off, Shift + delete for night / day, Shift + home, end, pageup, page down. operate the other buttons)
And then i added peeps when the buttons are pressed, i know most of them are silent in real life... but i wanted peeps.. so i made mine have peeps

Then i jumped to playing with textures, and i changed the MFA 'Notch indicator' digits, as used by the BR110, BR111 and similar steuerwagens which have the lever controlled automatic tap changer, for some reason the digits are orange, and look like nixie tube digits... my real MFA has yellow LED digits, so i changed those textures... i still havent got them lined up exactly right, but i think it looks a lot more realistic with the yellow LED style digits:

Please forgive the video's quality, i'm using my laptop to run both TrainSimulator and record it... and the screen recorder drop frames to keep up, so the sound goes out of synch a little too... i will try and find the best settings to correct this... but until a week or so ago, i'd never recorded my screen before.

I havent been doing that much in the way of mods to my trains... except i brightened up the MFA lights, digits and instrument backlight on the BR112.1.. i know it's supposed to be an old loco with age showing, but i mainly wanted the SIFA warning light to be brighter... and i made them all look like new instead
Please note that i can not run TSX i think it's called.. the Dynamic lighting thing on my laptop... unless i like playing at 1/2 a frame per second... so the loco may already look like this in that mode.

But i've been playing with the excellent TS_MFD, and bought a couple of cheap broken tablets for £7.50 each, one of them is totally dead... mother board is gone... but i got the other (much better)... lenovo one working and fitted a new digitizer and usb socket (total cost £14)

I just got the tablet holders today, so added them to my little over bed train sim table:

The plan is to retrieve my desktop PC's from storage and have TS running on the 42 inch TV at the end of the bed, with the view moved to be just behind the cab window,

then have TS_MFD sending the MFA, EBuLa and brake pressure gauge to the tablets on the overbed table... i put the brake pressure gauges on my phone... not seen in the photo as i used the phone to take the photo but the phone goes in the holder just below the working tablet.

I will also be making up some new levers for the controls.. to replace the siatek throttle quadrant i use atm, and make it into a little driving desk with switches and levers on it that fits on the table in place of the laptop.

Here is where i realise the beauty of the TS_MFD and the TS_Fireman and TS_Conductor being connected via wifi, instead of a thick umbilicle cord from the main computer, along the bed to the table, i just need power to keep the tablets charged... that's assuming i can use an arduino with a wifi shield on it to send the lever and switch data back to TS_Fireman.
would be nice if there was an all in one version here... TS - Conductor, Fireman and MFD just needing a single 'TS_Bridge' program running on the host PC,