I have decided to have full support for both conventional and DCC support of Engines. My design will make it possible to run Both decoder equipped engines and conventional engines running on the same layout concurrently without the "only one non Digital engine" limitation of standard DCC. The only limitation will be that each block is only occupied by one conventional engine or one or more decoder equipped engines. I don't currently have any plans to design Command Control hardware, but are integrating support for the dcc-mb.com driver.
I have invested in two ROCO HO Digitl startsets, each consisting of a DCC central(one spare!), Handheld controller and a Deutche Bundesbahn BR 080 engines, preprogrammed with adress 03. All I had to do was to reprogram one of the engines to address 04, and I had a running system. This was a really easy way of getting to DCC. The comming months will be used on integration with RCS/IO. I am considering investing in a Lenz PC interface, but have not decided yet !
Next task is building the controller and a simple booster. Controller Board (TMW001) has been built together with a power supply and the mini booster. I have been using a PIC16F84 chip. This requires a change of fuse PWRT=ON. (as documented for TMW DCC version 1.26).
I have problems getting the standard TMW hardware running. The Swedish Hobby Magazine Allt Om hobby have been running a series of articles about the TMW hardware and Software. I hope to get more info in the September issue.
I have not managed to getting control of DCC engines with the TMWDCC driver. I currently suspect transformer noise to be the problem
I am still having problems with hardware. I have tried to get +12 and -12 Volt from PC to get rid of transformer noice. But it does not seems to help. All decoder engines takes off when power is applied to the system, while DC engines starts making noise. This is probably due to some sort of AC on the track. I therefore suspect a bad PCB for TMW01 to be the reason. I have started programming some test programs for the pic 16c84 and i am going to boild a new PCB, but my last pic 16c84 blew up today, and new suplies is not possible until Easter holiday is finished.
I have build a new tmw1, tmw2 and tmw3 on one stripboard, and built a simple testprogram that turns the output on and of slowly - to make it posibly to test the card with a traditional Voltmeter.
First task is to get hardware running with software from the same web site that I got the hardware design from. Next task is to finish debugging of ioexec.com version 1.5 (With full Engine control for conventional block control). Version 1.5 will probably be available for download in September. This version has successfully been integrated with a standard DCC-MB.COM driver, by loading an extra TSR, and then running a small program that redirects the Interrupt from the DCC-MB driver to the new TSR. This TSR does a interrupt to the DCC-MB driver and then reads the IO Commander DCC interface, and if there is any messages there, it will do an INT70 to the DCC-MB driver. This now works.
I am nearing completion of ioexec.com version 1.5. The only thing that are missing is a check to see if engine is conventional or DCC, and then call DCC-MB driver if it is DCC. This might be finished by September. Progress will be reported next month.Version 1.5 is finished programming and software testing. However I will not release it until I have been successful testing it with the TMW hardware - Probably next month
I have started prototyping a throttle for Engine control. This will first be implemented as a Windows 16 bits program. And later also in hardware as a handhold device implemented on a PIC16F84 chip. The first prototype looks like:
Communication between throttle and driver will probably be implemented using different protocols. The first one will be
using the IOINT driver. This requires that both throttle (windows) and driver are running on the same machine. The next
one will probably be using RS-232 with the IO Commander command language, next one might be RS-232 with the command
language of North Coast Engineering, Ramtraxx, and
News October 1998
Download Version 1.5 of ioexec with the new iowt03 throttle
Read Draft of Throttle User Guide
I have bought two Atlas GP40-2 engines with preinstalled decoders - and one ready made decoder. I will also try to build my own using the design found at: How to build your own N-Scale DCC Decoder
I have also invested in two HO DCC starter kits - an it did run flawlessly out of the box! And they are compatible wilt Lenz
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