Railways, Railways on TV, TV

Going Straight on the Wrong Track

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The pilot episode of “Going Straight” (sequel to “Porridge“) was the  show that started me off on finding errors in TV shows when it came to their depiction of railways and trains, and Stafford.

According to Wikipedia, the plot of this episode is: “Fletch, having been paroled, makes his way home from prison. On the train, he bumps into Mr Mackay and an old friend.”

This is going to be a brief one, as I have no intention of identifying the coaches used, just highlighting errors.

I apologise in advance for the blurry nature of these screen-grabs. Things weren’t exactly HD back in 1978.

07:48 That’s a Deltic!

Yes, the blurry yet unmistakeable front end of a BR Class 55 Deltic, undisputed Kings of the East Coast Main Line in the late ’70s. Here we have the slight problem that anyone travelling from the fictional Slade Prison in Cumbria to London would be on the West Coast Main Line, which at the time used different locos.

07:55 That carriage looks fake

Ok, so I said I wasn’t going to start carriage spotting. I lied. Anyway, those seats look like school chairs, and the camera position would be about a foot outside the the carriage. Otherwise it doesn’t look too bad. It is a bit short though, and the windows are too far apart.

(aside: “26p for a beer!” Tartan Bitter!)

12:52 “This is Stafford, this is Stafford”

Indeed it is! And it looks as grotty today as it did then. Thirty years, and the main change is that those signs have been replaced. Multi-million pound refurbishment my arse!

As far as I can make out, the loco is BR Class 86 86221 , but someone will point out my error if I’m wrong. Clearly not a Deltic though, and certainly WCML not ECML!

13:03 Running though the tunnel.

Hold your horses! A tunnel? At Stafford Station? Such a thing has never existed! The main reason for this is that the station lies too close to the flood level that about 10 minutes of rain will bring.  On a good day, the park (opposite the station) becomes a boating lake (important note: do not take an inflatable dinghy out on the flooded park – the police will get involved and it will not end well).

And the Manchester Evening News advert? Not ’round here mate.

13:48 This is what a real carriage looks like!

Filmed on filmstock, not the video tape used for the fake carriage above.

Fast forward to…

22:42 “Watford Junction”

First thing to notice is that the loco has changed. I *think* this is BR Class 86  86208, but that loco doesn’t seem to have gone into service until 1979 (same for 86221 above).

Anyway, the mismatched locos weren’t the point of this. The point is, Stafford Station doesn’t have a tunnel, didn’t have one in the ’70s, and TV producers still don’t pay enough attention to detail.

(See posts about Doctor Who and Railways for more guff).

Doctor Who, Railways, Railways on TV, TV

Doctor Who: Trains on the Flatline

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“Flatline”, S08E09, is an episode of the new Doctor Who which has bothered me for a while. I’m not on about the plot, which I quite like, but I always wanted to know where the railways scenes were filmed, and what the stock was.

I’m not going to dissect the whole episode, just the bits that refer to railways. So, obviously we’re going to be ignoring a hell of a lot of the episode.

03:00 – 04:06  and we already know where we are: Barry Island. Specifically,  on the former trackbed of the original Vale of Glamorgan line which would have run though Barry Island Tunnel. The building is the Plymouth Road Shed, just to the east of Barry Island Station.

Which, by the Magic of Television, has now moved to become part of  Bristol Sidings 344 (confirmed in the dialogue).

Note that Clara walks off in the direction of the tunnel. She’d get about 200 yards before hitting the fence. All civilisation lieth the other way…

06:16 – 0814 Same location (minus the TARDIS interiors). Nothing new to learn here.

20:15 – 25:11 And we’re in one of the Barry sheds (when we aren’t in the TARDIS). Note the presence of BR Class 08 Shunter 08503, one car of a DMU set (probably BR Class 101 DCTL 56356) and parts of a steam loco with a GW partly restored tender. There also seems to be a Road-Rail Vehicle and some more carriages in BR Yellow, but they’re not clear enough to identify.

And then they run into a storeroom, which allegedly leads to the tunnel (really, it doesn’t).

25:23 – 27:47 The tunnel. Note immediately the lack of tracks. Barry Tunnel is a shooting range.

To be fair, the do say that this is the “old tunnel” and set off to the junction with the “new tunnel”.  Good luck finding that one on Barry though.

A big hand snatches someone away, some running happens, and they need to open a door. But wait, suddenly they have track! As Barry does not have any track within a tunnel, we are clearly somewhere else now. Let us see how this unfolds.

27:47 – 29:42 Another tunnel. Cue running, and the TARDIS getting dropped a few floors. On to the running line. Specifically on to a Barrow Crossing over a running line.

Now forgive me if I’m wrong, but the TARDIS shouldn’t actually be in danger at this point. The train should just pass over it.

29:42 – 29:44 Cue a CGI/SFX  representation what looks like a 3-car DMU (likely a Class 117)in BR Green with an A113 headcode thundering down the tunnel. BR Green. Headcode. In 2014? And A113? Well its not a valid code anyway, and is just an in-joke with animators.

30:08 – 30:21  And The Doctor is doing his best to actually get the TARDIS directly under a wheel.

30:35 – 30:47 TARDIS falls back on to the rail, and The Doctor pulls a lever. Yeah, maybe that should have been done earlier.

30:48 – 31:41 In the tunnel, and a train is coming. The same CGI’d one that is now 2M65.

32:01 – 32:25 Stationary in the tunnel. It looks to me like a BR Class 117.

32:32 A BR Logo

That Logo is the “Ferret and Dartboard” one used from 1956 to 1965.

32:37 Hang on… Red seat moquette? Cubic grab-handles? Modern arrow signage? Drop window slam doors? Wales? Could this be the Gatwick Express Mark 2F/Class 488 set again? Possibly, but the colours are wrong.

  32:39 (approx) Even working this frame-by-frame doesn’t help. Best I can get is W5???3 or something.

32:40 – 33:19 Back in the cab. Nothing helpful here really.

Scenes from 32:32 onwards doesn’t show any tunnel parts, so could well just be filmed in the dark at Barry.  Sadly Barry doesn’t have the right rolling stock, so we have to look elsewhere… maybe somewhere with a tunnel to film in that isn’t too far from Wales.

Step forward the Gloucestershire Warwickshire Railway, which conveniently has a Class 117 set (W51360, W59510, W51363) and Greet Tunnel. W51363 could be the blurry number above.

So far we’ve got:

  • BR Class 08 Shunter 08503
  • BR Class 101 DCTL 56356
  • BR Class 117 (W51360, W59510, W51363)
  • Unknown Mark 2F/3 Possibly from the Class 288 Gatwick Express set at Barry.

And with that, I think my work is done.

TV

The JAGverse Family Tree

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In the beginning Bellisario created the ‘verse. Now the ‘verse was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Bellisario was hovering over the waters.

And Bellisario said, “Let there be JAG,” and there was JAG. 

And in time JAG begat NCIS, and NCIS begat NCIS: Los Angeles and NCIS: New Orleans. After the initial NCIS Backdoor Pilot on JAG, JAG characters started appearing on NCIS. Similarly, following their respective pilots, NCIS:LA and NCIS:NO shared characters with their parent series, but oddly not each other. Also, a JAG character started cropping up on NCIS:LA. So thus we have (Note: the arrows show the flow of characters):

But, we also have JAG importing a character from the not-very-popular First Monday (I’m possibly the only person in the UK to have bothered watching it): Edward Sheffield (Dean Stockwell), later Secretary of the Navy.

And then the walls of the ‘verse were broken, when Hetty from NCIS:LA appeared on Scorpion, and a crossover happened between NCIS:LA and Hawaii Five-0 (the reboot of Hawaii Five-O).

Hawaii Five-0 opens up another can of worms though. Characters appeared in MacGyver (2016), the reboot of MacGyver (1985). And then there are the cross-overs with Magnum P.I. (2018), itself a reboot of Magnum p.i. (1980).

Phew. That is a lot of interconnected TV. But we’re not done yet! Oh no, there is more.

In 2015, Duane “Dog” Chapman appeared on Hawaii Five-0 as himself, thus establishing that he exists within the ‘verse. And in 2018 Mike Wolfe of American Pickers popped up on NCIS, adding his show in to the mix.

So many series tied together does of course bring up problems. Aside from many actors being reused across the various shows (Terry O’Quinn, Sean Murray, Michael Bellisario, Dean Stockwell, and Zoe McLellan being the most obvious), there are the various references made to the other shows. DiNozzo in NCIS was a big Magnum p.i. fan, and Gibbs mentioned Hawaii Five-O once.

Then there is DiNozzo naming Bellisario, and being a Quantum Leap fan but not recognising that Dwayne Pride is Scott Bakula.

This does bring up the interesting possibilty that Dwayne is actually Sam Beckett on an extended leap, but temporarily unaware of his circumstances, not being in contact with Al.  If you look at S05E01 “See You Soon” in a certain way, it could be seen to be his daughter Samantha (or even Ziggy) trying to bring Sam back into the QL program.

If Pride exited the series in a blue halo with the appropriate sound effects it would be a better end than his last leap: the one where he spent four years as a ship captain that may or not have been a computer simulation run by a fat man with a beard.

Sorry, I got carried away again.

As of Monday, Octorber 15th 2018 this is up to date. If things change, I will try to keep up with the changes.

 

Doctor Who, Railways, Railways on TV, TV

Doctor Who: The Woman Who Fell … On To A Train

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So, Doctor Who Season 11 Episode 01. I’m sure theres been enough whining elsewhere about the Doctor being  a woman (so was the other 13th Doctor, Joanna Lumley,  and you weren’t moaning then), or having a Northern accent (McCoy and Capaldi used their Scottish accents, and Eccleston was Mancunian), so I won’t bother here. Plus I just don’t care.

There has, however, been criticsm of the accuracy of the rail services and vehicles depicted in the episode, and, well, you know where this is going…

So, we’re not looking at the whole episode, just the bits from 06:14 to 14:31. To sum up, what you are about to read is possibly the most pointless waste of several hours to overanalyse 8 minutes and 16 seconds of screentime that you will enocounter this week.

Let me make it clear that I am not an expert on the rail vehicles involved and I’ve been to the filming location once (co-incidentally while on a weekend away to visit the Doctor Who Experience), but I do like it when my interests intersect.  Just like Queen’s “Breakthru” video.

 

06:14-06:17 The first appearance of the train

Not much to go on here, apart from a blurry night shot of what appears to be a three-car DMU (from the lack of visible OLE), but a very strange one.

The first car appears to have a front end with no passenger area, followed by a door, a seven-windowed passenger area and a door. The nose itself look very odd, but more of that later.

The seconds car appears to have a door, 12 windows, and another door.

The third car I can only assume is a reverse of the first.

Note the details of the doors and windows. The windows have cross-frames and the doors have two panes, possibly indicating folding doors.

This all looks wrong to me. It doesn’t conform to any DMU layout that I’m aware of, especially nothing running in the South Yorkshire area. So back to the nose. If we play around the brightness and contrast and whatnots, we get this poor image, which puts me in mind of a loco built by English Electric. Maybe a Class 37, or 40.

Sadly, both are too long to fit with the image. The overly bright headlight (which no British Locos have in that position) bothers me too, as does the lack of illumination from the drivers’s windows.

In the absence of any more evidence, I’m going to have to conclude that this train is a CGI knock-off. Something more or less backed up by the information gathered later.

06:18 – 06:38 Inside the carriage

Ok, now we are on more familiar ground. From this image (Warning: contains traces of Bradley Walsh, a multi-talented man who unfortunately will never better this moment of his career: The Fanny Chmelar Incident), it appeared at first to be a modernised, but not recently renovated, BR Mark 3 coach. Note the seat moquette, the grab handles, the shelving and the lighting.

Further checking revealed it to be a rebuilt BR Mark 2F, classified as Class 488. A Class only used on the Gatwick Express route.

In contrast, this is an East Midlands Trains renovated Mark 3, as currently in use in that part of the world. Similar, but not the same.


(Image from Wikipedia, by PeterSkuce – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link)

But what part of the world is it? Time to go to the dialogue. From the train announcement, which is very difficult to make out, the “next stop is Grindleford”. This is confirmed later (08:15) “The train’s stopped between Hathersage and Grindleford”. This puts us on the Hope Valley Line,

The Hope Valley line runs from Manchester Piccadilly to Sheffield, and this section is between the River Hope and Totley Tunnel, close to the Sheffield end.  Trains that run along here are operated by Northern, and East Midlands Trains. We’ll discount Northern, as they mainly use the awful Pacers and  not-much-better Sprinters. So EMT it is (but of course it isn’t).

06:39 – 06:43 Quick in cab shot

Back on dodgy ground again. This in-cab shot is clearly not a Class 43 (HST power car), which you would expect to be hauling a rake of Mark 3s for EMT, if they were Mark 3s, which of course they aren’t.

It is too flat-fronted.  Back to this later.

06:43 – 07:14 Back in the carriage

Note the lack of cross-frames on the windows (see above). Also note the use of the standard “power fails, lights go out one by one” Trope so common in Doctor Who. All the light should have died at once if all power failed.

07:15 -11:30 Outside and inside the carriage

And immediatedly we have a problem.

These are drop-window, swing-door, outside-open-operated Mark 2Fs. In what appears to be an InterCity style livery (actually Gatwick Express).  We are into Preservation/Heritage Line territory now.

“Don’t go ont’ track, it could be live!” Poppycock. The Hope Valley Line is not 3rd rail electrified, and has no OLE.

“Graham, t’doors just locked, we’re shut in” – dramatic buffery. In a power failure the door locking would lose power and unlock.

Theres plenty of Sci-Fi guff happens, which for the purposes of this we don’t really care about.

At 09:16 The Doctor appears to fall in through the roof.

And more guff happens.

10:56 “This is the last train back” – Ah we can have a look at some timetables now…

Assuming its set on a weekend (why else would they be piss-arsing around on a hilltop?), let us look at the last trains that run.

On a Saturday its the 21:37 Liverpool Lime Street to Nottingham servive (1L20), which calls at Hathersage at 23:14 and Grindleford at 23:18. On Sundays it would be the 21:16, stopping at 23:05 and 23:12. Both are pather as Sprinters though.

More uniportant guff and then we go straight from a Mark 2F coach sliding door into…

11:30 – 11:56 The cab

The cab of BR 68509 (Unit 9110). Not, as you would expect, a BR Class 68, but a BR Class 414  DMBS (later Class 489 DMLV) numbered 68059 in the carriage series and formerly part of 459110. The flat front profile fits the previous in-cab shot, so that ties that up nicely, but certainly does not match the first picture. So I’m still going with CGI on that count.

And where is this 1959 vintage item to be found these days? Well she’s out to pasture at the Barry Tourist Railway, which is not too far from Cardiff. Barry has been used by the Doctor Who production team before (“Flatline”), and just happens to have some Class 488 coaches laying about.


 

Click here for original and more info…

11:57 – 14:31 Back into the carriage

Nothing of interest. After this we’re off the train and it is time to compare our notebooks.

Conclusions

So what have we copped on this little trip?

A CGI train, a cab we can identify, and at least two Mark 2F (Class 488) coaches. So, can we identify the coaches?

Firstly, are they Standard or First Class? By the seat moquettes and spacing, I’d say Standard. With them being at Barry, I’d therefore say that some (if not all) of BR Class 488/3 unit 488311 (72620+72710+72621) were used.

So, set in Yorkshire on an East Midlands Trains service, but actually filmed at Barry on an old Gatwick Express set. Geeenniiiusssss.

 

Doctor Who, TV

Enumerating The Doctor (Updated)

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Since the recent goings on with which Doctor is which, and all the complications, I’ve put together a table to try to explain it. It might be wrong, but it is more for me than for anyone else.

And I think, as I’ve stumbled through this, I’ve finally got a handle on The Valeyard (more later).

Incarnation
Regeneration
Looks like
Doctor #
Known as
Played by
Notes
1 n/a 1 The First Doctor William Hartnell
also Richard Hurndall and later David Bradley
n/a n/a n/a Doctor Who Peter Cushing A human who created a time travel device called TARDIS. Non-canon, so I don’t even know why he’s listed here.
2 1 2 The Second Doctor Patrick Troughton
3 2 3 The Third Doctor Jon Pertwee
4 3 4 The Fourth Doctor Tom Baker
(A wax dummy)
5 4 5 The Fifth Doctor Peter Davison
6 5 6 The Sixth Doctor Colin Baker,Sylvester McCoy
7 6 7 The Seventh Doctor Sylveter McCoy
8 7 8 The Eighth Doctor Paul McGann
Now it goes a bit runny
Firstly we have the “Shalka” timeline…
9 8 9 (alt) “The Shalka Doctor” Richard E. Grant (Animated version)
Then the “Final Death” timeline
9 8 9 (alt) “The Nineth Doctor” Rowan Atkinson
10 9 10 (alt) “The Tenth Doctor” Richard E. Grant “The Conceited Doctor”
11 10 11 (alt) “The Eleventh Doctor” Jim Broadbent “The Shy Doctor”
12 11 12 (alt) “The Twelfth Doctor” Hugh Grant “The Quite Handsome Doctor”
13 12 13 (alt) “The Thirteenth Doctor” Joanna Lumley “The Female Doctor”
Meanwhile, back on the “real” timeline…
Incarnation
Regeneration
Looks like
Doctor #
Known as
Played by
Notes
9 8 n/a The War Doctor John Hurt (Not actually The Doctor)
10 9 9 The Ninth Doctor Christopher Eccleston
11 10 10 The Tenth Doctor David Tennant
11 11 10 The Tenth Doctor David Tennant Vanity Regeneration
n/a n/a n/a Handy/John Smith David Tennant Human Meta-Crisis Doctor
12 12 11 The Eleventh Doctor Matt Smith
Start of a new Regeneration cycle
13 13 12 The Twelveth Doctor Peter Capaldi
14 14 13 The Thirteenth Doctor Jodie Whittaker
Unknown “Doctors”
n/a n/a n/a The Watcher Adrian Gibbs
n/a n/a n/a The Curator Tom Baker
n/a n/a n/a The Valeyard Michael Jaystone an amalgamation of the Doctor’s darker sides from between his twelfth and final incarnations

Now, after all that number counting and trying to work out which numbers apply to which Doctors, if you go by my reckoning then the Eleventh Doctor (Matt Smith) was still only the 12th incarnation, even though he was also the 12 regeneration. To quote The Master from “The Trial of a Time Lord: The Ultimate Foe“:

“There is some evil in all of us, Doctor – even you. The Valeyard is an amalgamation of the darker sides of your nature, somewhere between your twelfth and final incarnation, and I may say you do not improve with age.”

As the “final incarnation” is far off in The Doctor’s personal timeline, the Valeyard problem has been untangled for now, but could surface in the future as a plot point.

Site News

Hello, again, world!

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After the accidental deleting of the original site, and the the short time with the 2002 look site, the blog format is back… with a 2010 template design. I’m nothing if not cutting edge.

I won’t bring back anything I don’t think is important or interesting. So it’ll be projects I’m working on (still), ranting about TV, picking holes in films, and othersuch twaddle.

 

Health

So you think you’re having a heart attack?

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As it is five years today since I had my pathetic little heart attack (if there can be such a thing), I thought I’d put finger to keyboard about my thoughts on a certain bullshit thing thats going around t’internet like a sawn-off broom handle in a convent (since 1999 – but such shit never dies due to Facetube/Buzzspace/Mybook/Youfeed whatever).

I’m not going to link to it, but its called “Cough CPR”, and the idea seems to be thus: Rhythmically coughing while having a heart attack will save your life. This is obviously horseshit. (I will, however link to the Snopes page about it: http://www.snopes.com/medical/homecure/coughcpr.asp).

Should you think you are having a heart attack, and you’re alone, you really have two options. I shall present them here, so you can choose which one you think is the right one.

Option 1:Sit down and have a cup of tea.

Look on the internet about heart attacks.

Go and have a dump*.

Try and have a lie down, hoping the pain will go away.

Have a smoke. Things are always better after a smoke.

Look on the internet again.

Have another cup of tea and a smoke.

Realise that you can’t stand up properly.

Ring NHS Direct and get kept talking while they sneakily send an ambulance to get you.

 

 

 Option 2:

Ring the fucking emergency services right away!!!

And don’t forget to grab your ‘phone and charger, otherwise you’ll be bored shitless.

*Oddly, heart attacks bring on the feeling that you’re about to suffer from diarrhea. This is probably why a lot of people die on the khazi, and certainly why all toilets in hospitals have an emergency alarm nearby.

Computers, Pi-Dalek, Projects, Raspberry Pi

Camera of the Dalek

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I wanted to stream video from the Dalek camera to whatever browser was looking at it.  I asked t’Internet and it provided the answer.  Mr Miguel Grinberg has provided a nice tutorial on the matter, which I’ll now rip the bits I need from.

Install what you need and link header file.

$ apt-get install libjpeg8-dev imagemagick libv4l-dev
$ ln -s /usr/include/linux/videodev2.h /usr/include/linux/videodev.h

As an ex-Unix admin  who spent 10 years with a root prompt without anything going wrong, I fail to see the point of “sudo”. Just go to root and save the typing. You can be just as destructive either way.

Anyway, rant over.

Download, build and install  MJPG-Streamer

$ wget http://sourceforge.net/code-snapshots/svn/m/mj/mjpg-streamer/code/mjpg-streamer-code-182.zip
$ cd mjpg-streamer-code-182/mjpg-streamer
$ make mjpg_streamer input_file.so output_http.so $ sudo cp mjpg_streamer /usr/local/bin
$ sudo cp output_http.so input_file.so /usr/local/lib/
$ sudo cp -R www /usr/local/www

Thats it all done. To start it up, run the code snippet from rc.local below.

And to get the streaming running from boot time, you’ll need this is /etc/rc.local before the exit 0:

# start camera module for web server
mkdir /tmp/stream
/usr/bin/raspistill --nopreview -w 320 -h 240 -q 5 -o /tmp/stream/pic.jpg -tl 100 -t 9999999 -th 0:0:0 &
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib mjpg_streamer -i "input_file.so -f /tmp/stream -n pic.jpg" -o "output_http.so -w /usr/local/www" &

So far so good.  You can view the video streaming from your camera by pointing your browser thusly:

http://servername:8080/stream_simple.html

You will have to put the ip address of your pi in there if you haven’t fettled your DNS/hosts file to refer to it.

Next comes some hardware work on the case to get all the bits bolted/glued into place.

Computers, Pi-Dalek, Projects, Raspberry Pi

Ports of the Dalek

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I’ve decided on what interfaces the Pi-Dalek will mounted on the rear of the case.

  • USB-B socket to accept power for charging the internal battery (a mobile phone emergency charger. Internally the socket offers a USB-A socket which is connected to the Pi with a short USB-A-to-microUSB-B cable, then the emergency charger, then another short USB-A-to-microUSB-B cable.
  • USB-A socket for memory sticks etc. Connected to the UTG socket with a short UTG cable.
  • HDMI socket. Connected to the miniHDMI socket on the Pi with a short adapter cable.

These will be mounted on the arse-end of the Dalek.  Two on the 3rd row up of the Dalek-bumps on the rear panel (both USB ports), with the HDMI socket on one of the rear flank quarters (3rd row up).

Ideally I’d like them all on the back, but the bumps on row 1 are blocked by the motor housing, while rows 2 and 4 have far too many structual bits behind it.

This still leaves me with the issue of mounting the camera. While I’d love to have the camera mounted to the eyestalk, this is impractical.  Mainly as the eyestalk is missing, but also because the camera module is a huge square blob that wouldn’t look right.

The best I can hope is to mount the camera on the Glacis, between the Whisk and Plunger, just above the top of the skirt. It will still mean that some cutting will have to be done, but it will probably not look as awful.

I’ve also decided that instead of mounting the Pi and Motozero directly to the base chassis, I’ll mount them upside down hanging from the internal ceiling at the top of the skirt. This shortens the distance to where I want the camera to be, and means only 6 wires need to be run down to the base (motor power +/-, motor left +/- and motor right +/-). Everything else will be skirt mounted. So the 40pin GPIO header connection twixt Pi and Motozero forms the split in the arrangement.

A sort of split between the head and body, if you want to make up some sort of analogy up.

I’m sure there’ll be some photos of it when its done.

Computers, Pi-Dalek, Projects, Raspberry Pi

Installing Raspbian on a Pi-zero W

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There is so simple way to do this. I’ve tried several times and failed each time. So here is my idea to make things easy.

    1. Download your prefered Raspbian Jessie version from https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/raspbian/ be it Lite or with Pixel.
    2. Get and install Etcher, and use that to burn your image to the microSD card.
    3. Remount the SD card and create a file on it called “ssh”.  Create another file called “wpa_supplicant.conf” with contains: 
      update_config=1
ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant

network={
         scan_ssid=1
         ssid="yournetworkname"
         psk="yourpassword"
}
    4. This should enable you to boot the Zero-W. It should then get an an address for your LAN via DHCP. All you have to do is check you router, or use Fing (or something like it ) to find it.

IT DOESN’T WORK!

Ah. Do you have another Pi with a wired connection somewhere about the place? Good.

Pop your microSD card from your new Pi-zero into an adapter and boot your other Pi (in my case one of my KODI boxes) and boot it.

Find the machine on your network and login (“pi” and “root” have the password “raspberry”).

As root, run

apt-get update
apt-get upgrade

And, while you have a wired connection, install Apache2 and PHP5.

apt-get install apache2
apt-get install php5

Set your new hostname in /etc/hostname now, so you’ll ne able to identify it later.

After thats done, shut it down, pop the card into the Pi-Zero W, and it should come up and appear on your network.

From Fing or your hub you should be able to get the MAC address and add the to your DHCP.

And it should all work.

Additional note concerning #3 above. If you are planning to use it on more that one WiFi network (example: I use my home network, and also the hotspot on my phone if I’m working on it anywhere but at home), your wpa_supplicant.conf file can contain multiple network entries.  Thusly:

update_config=1
ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant

network={
         scan_ssid=1
         ssid="yournetworkname"
         psk="yourpassword"
}
network={
         scan_ssid=1
         ssid="yourhotspotnetworkname"
         psk="yourhotspotpassword"
}

Put the entries in order of preference.

words words word, and some pictures