|
|
Saturday, October 1, 2022
From TCS: CS-105 DCC & LCC Command Station Now Shipping
Tuesday, September 20, 2022
LokProgrammer PC-Software V5.2.2 Released
- New firmware 5.6.147 for LokSound 5 family: Register conditions <= and >= have been interpreted as > or < in the sound schedule
- New firmware 5.6.145 for LokPilot 5L: Support for new silicon revisions of the ARM controller
- New firmware 1.0.8. for SignalPilot: Support for up to two SwitchPilot Extension modules (future hardware upgrade). Outputs configured for automatic timeout will no longer be enabled at startup. This fixes issues with motorized switch motors
- New firmware 3.0.13 for SwitchPilot 3 Servo: Servo pulses will be sent to the servo every 20mS now. This fixes issues with Faller servos
- Bugfixes: Sound schedule: Container code size validation corrected
- Soundsimulator: Register conditions <= and >= have been interpreted as < and >
If you have an idea for a blog post here, let me know. If I can comment on it, I will or I'll see if someone else can and post it
Monday, September 19, 2022
Automatic Horn Signals With ESU Decoders
Locomotives have specific horn signals they issue when starting to move in either forward or reverse directions. Two medium blasts indicate starting forward movement and three short blasts indicate starting reverse movement. They also have a stop signal of one short blast to indicate they are done moving in either direction.
It’s not difficult to add
these signals to any ESU LokSound sound file if you have minimal experience
working with sound slots and sound schedules. I have given several tutorials
for working with these objects such as this one.
This is a little more complicated task than the previous automatic bell project
but again, not too difficult. We’ll use the ESU sound file
S0539-LS5H0DCC-Diesel-EMD-12-645E3-T-V4-R4.esux located here one more time.
The Forward and Reverse Signals
Open the sound file in the LokProgrammer
and go to the sound pane. Double click on an empty sound slot (we’ll use sound
slot 28 this time). Once you have this opened add two containers, one for the
forward horn and one for the reverse horn. Name them Forward Signal and Reverse
Signal respectively. For the forward container add a group of conditions
Function = true, Reverse = false and Requested Speed > 0. For the reverse
container add a group of conditions Function = true, Reverse = true and Requested Speed > 0. This
controls the logic of when horn signals sound. All of this is shown in fig 1.
Figure 1 the basic containers
Once inside the containers
the sound files you use will depend on the horn you want for the particular
locomotive you are adding this sound file to. These files are located in the
lower right corner of the sound pane. You can use drag-and-drop to put them in
the states. Now double click on the Forward Signal container. Here you will add
four states in series. First the horn’s init sound followed by the horn’s exit
sound then the init sound again and the exit sound again. This is shown in fig
2.
All horns
have Init and Exit sound files associated with them. Most also have Fast Exit
sounds where you could use the Fast Exit in the first exit state and then the
Exit file in the second one. It’s entirely up to you. The simulator will help
you decide.
Lastly, click
on the Reverse Signal container. Here you will do exactly what you did in the
Forward Signal container except add one more Init and Exit cycle to complete
the three blasts as in fig 3.
The Stop Signal
For the Stop signal you will need another
sound slot. Use slot 31 for our example. Here we again add a container that
will have the sound file states in it but we will add one additional state to the
slot and this is the horn delay shown in fig 3. It uses the silence.wav file
which is included in all sound projects which gives a short delay from the
engine stopping to the horn sounding.
The Stop Signal itself
consists of a single init/exit horn sequence as we did in fig 3.
When mapping these to a
function put both sound slots on the same function and be sure to add the Drive signal to the function you choose (this is
critical). The author usually uses function 3 due to not using the coupler
function, again, your choice. See fig 5.
If you have an idea for a blog post here, let me know. If I can comment on it, I will or I'll see if someone else can and post it
Wednesday, September 7, 2022
WOW Sound and RailCom
Tue, 06 Sep 2022 10:48:24 PDT
From: Dan [TCS]
None of the current-generation WOWSound decoders support RailCom.
In the past we offered WOWSound decoders with RailCom, but then the RailCom spec/standard was drastically changed repeatedly within a short period of time so we took it out of the WOWSound line for maintainability reasons.
With WOWSound Version 5, this will no longer be an issue, as we plan to offer download-able firmware updates for our decoder products as well. As such, we are intending to roll out ALL Version 5 WOWSound decoders with RailCom. We are also committed to enabling all TCS decoders with RailCom as we move into the future. As decoders come up for hardware updates and re-design, we will be integrating RC if it was not already. Our current non-sound product line is already very comprehensively covered, especially in the smaller scales. And with good reason (wink).
For the record, if you want to see the COMPLETE LIST of decoder products which support RC, it can be found on THIS WIKI PAGE. This page also lists the software version(s) after which a specific product began supporting RC. Version 89 of non-sound decoders included an update of the RC communications which run inside the decoder. This update makes the decoder compatible with the latest RC protocol, whereas older versions may or may not function (properly) on command stations which feature the latest RC protocol. This is a complicated issue of cat and mouse - confusion and frustration is understandable, but rest assured we are trying our best to keep up with this ever-evolving protocol.
--
Dan
Engineering and Product Development
Train Control Systems
If you have an idea for a blog post here, let me know. If I can comment on it, I will or I'll see if someone else can and post it.
Tuesday, September 6, 2022
Death of the Digitrax Tool Box Android App
The Digitrax Tool Box has been removed from the Android Phone Store. After asking Digitrax's help desk what happened to it, the help desk replied:
The toolbox app was removed for the Android store because its codebase needing[sic] to be 100% changed. It died an unceremonious death about two or three years ago.
There are no plans at this time to offer it again
A suitable substitute is DCC Tools.
If you have an idea for a blog post here, let me know. If I can comment on it, I will or I'll see if someone else can and post it.