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Tuesday, December 15, 2020

TCS Announces Firmware Fix for LNWI

This post is related to the Author's previous post on the same subject. You can't blame TCS for bragging.


TCS is happy to announce that after several months of diagnostics and extensive trail-and-error-testing, we have been able to identify and resolve a known communications error between the UWT-100 throttle and the Digitrax LNWI.

We would like to thank the users who brought this issue to our attention, and are pleased to report that all is well once again!

In summary, the issue in the LNWI from Digitrax was caused by a change by the manufacturer of the WiFi device inside the LNWI. This change in the WiFi module required a software tweak by Digitrax. Without this new software update, the LNWI would sometimes have issues communicating with certain MAC addresses. The MAC addresses which would cause errors would need to end in ":4F" or less (in Hex) in order to throw errors and have issues communicating. With this being the case, this issue was not universal to all LNWI's and UWT-100's, making it very hard to diagnose! Additionally, this issue was NOT limited to the TCS UWT-100, and was easily reproduce-able on cell phone apps given the MAC address matched the criteria. We have confirmed that the issue has been resolved in the new update, which is available from Digitrax on their website:

https://www.digitrax.com/downloads/

If you have an LNWI with this issue (some throttles won't connect), here is what you can do:

  • Follow the link above to download the LNWI firmware to your PC
  • Download and install the Digitrax DigiIPL program (used to update firmware)
  • Connect a PR3, PR4, etc. directly (and only to) the LNWI
  • Check the firmware version of the LNWI using DigilPL. If it says 0.1 and you're having the problem, you can apply the update
  • Load the new firmware into your LNWI. NOTE: While a LocoBuffer-USB will most likely work, there are a small number of cases where the LNWI won't recover from an error and you'll have to send your LNWI back to Digitrax to get it fixed.
Also note that if you're not having any problems with your LNWI, you probably don't need the update.

Again, we would like to thank the community for your prompt identification of this error's existence, and your patience while our team worked to find a solution. Suffice to say, we are pleased to know that we have delivered on a solid product, and the issue was not on our end.

We would also like to extend a thank you to Digitrax as well for their cooperation in diagnosing the issue and offering a fix.

We also look forward to continuing to deliver updates and new features to the UWT-100, as well as even more WiFi-enabled products moving forward. We hope you'll stick with us for the ride!



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