Chuntybunt

So I added a couple of LEDs to my dummy loco attached to decoder function outputs 1 and 2 and it all appears to work fine. Not sure about the higher functions yet as I haven't had a chance to test them and I don't have any bells and whistles locos anyway at the moment. I'm not sure I like the setup of the keypad but that's fairly straight forward to change and I will probably knock up a custom one anyway. But here you have a basic throttle (excluding a case which would probably be the most expensive single part) for under £15.00. there is no accessory control at present, I may look at that in the future but I don't intend having turnout control on DCC.

Hello David, I have also added a pullup to the direction pin. Have you seen any functions working? I have hooked the throttle up to a DCC++ base with a small motor through a Lais decoder and this appears to work fine but when I connected the throttle to another arduino to monitor the serial output couldn't see any function commands being sent. I'm just off to solder some leds to my decoder test board to be sure.

Interesting, I had a go at building the pot version of this just yesterday. I had to fiddle with the code to get it to compile and as you say it needs cleaning up but it appears to be basically there though. I haven't had it connected to the base station yet have you? I will have a better look at your code when I get access to a bigger screen.

Pete I think the OP is correct and you should do a bit more investigation when a user gives you this sort of information rather than just thinking “All good on my site”. Your site appears to have been hacked, when you type the address in the address bar or hit a link to it it's fine but if you try to get to it from Google you get redirected to another site, it's called a conditional hack, see this link for info https://support.google.com/webmasters/thread/4643174?hl=en. This hack appears to be fairly benign but if this has been hacked other areas of your site could have been tampered also, with more drastic results as your site security is obviously not up to scratch. I understand you don't take payments via your site but you are not using HTTPS on your checkout page and if user data has been compromised you could fall foul of the law,

I thought I would do a brief update on this thread and my experiences so far with DCC++. Now it's been nearly a year, and a busy one at that, and I can't remember the exact sequence of events but this is a rough summary of how things played out. I did indeed buy another motor shield but not a genuine Arduino one. I bought another clone off E-bay that was the same as others had used and not reported any problems with. I set it all up and had exactly the same issues as before, I could run my Hornby class 73 with the Zimo MX600r, but could not read the loco address. This was at the end of January 2019. I went away fro a short holiday and started a new job on my return, the job has kept me very busy and I have had no time for playing with trains ( I considered giving the job up!). Around November I thought I would give things another go. I ordered another motor shield as I still thought this was the issue, this time a genuine Arduino one at about £30.00 rather than £4.00. while waiting for the motor shield to turn up I tried the decoder in another loco, a Heljan 47, once again the same results I could drive but not read or write to the decoder. My Arduino shield arrived and I put it all together and again the same results. I bought another power supply, no change. I borrowed a genuine Arduino Mega to replace my £12.00 clone, no change. At this point I was about to give up on the whole DCC++ thing and was thinking about getting a MREG setup. I had tried every conceivable combination of the hardware, I had read through pages of posts on The Train Board and had changed all sorts of values in the software of both the base station and the Processing sketch all to no avail. Back in January I had directly wired the Laisdcc decoder to a Mitsumi motor but had done nothing with it as I hadn't needed to because I had a proper branded Zimo decoder that cost twice the price and was always going to be better then some cheep piece of rubbish bought off of E-bay. I hadn't used the Laisdcc decoder in the locos because it was bare ended wires without an eight pin plug on the end. I connected the red and black wires of the decoder directly to the terminals on the motor shield and lo and behold I was able to read from the decoder, it was a miracle! I tried it with all the other motor shields and all worked perfectly. I thought there must be a problem with my programming track wiring, dirt on the track, dirty wheels on the locos. In order to test things I made a decoder tester on a piece of strip board with the motor and wired a plug onto the Laisdcc decoder. Again I could read and write to the decoder without any problem. I plugged in the Zimo and back came the problems. So in conclusion there is nothing wrong with DCC++ it was the Zimo MX600r decoder that was causing the problems all along. Just to rub salt into the wounds as I was about to write this post I came across this post from back in September If I had seen this at the time I could have saved myself a whole heap of pain but there you go. So you can use clone Arduino bits and cheep decoders for DCC++ in fact, excluding a PSU, you can have a base station and decoder running a loco for just over £20.00. I will be buying a few more Laisdcc decoders, but no more Zimos, and hopefully next year I can do a bit more playing with trains and a bit less tail chasing. was

Thanks for the replies, I was busy yesterday but I have had a quick poke about this morning. The motor shield I have is a cheep generic one and sticking a meter on it and comparing it to the schematic shows up a couple of anomalies. On my shield the SENSE_A and SENSE_B pins are connected directly to GND where as they should be connected through a 0.15 ohm resistor second the sense pins that should be connected directly to the analogue pins 0 and 1 are connected through an 11k resistor. So my conclusion is that my motor shield is not suitable for the project, I will order another motor shield (of the type that other people have used successfully) and report back.

Nick here is a link to the motor shield schematic. https://www.arduino.cc/en/uploads/Main/arduino_MotorShield_Rev3-schematic.pdf As far as I'm aware all the current/ACK pulses sensing is handled by the L298 an then fed to the arduino on analogue pins 1 and 2, for the main and programing tracks, and no other hardware is necessary. Other Nick, I forgot to check the preferences but I'm sure everything is set to DCC++ I have had some success in re-addressing the Zimo decoder, by adjusting the values in CurrentMonitor.h I was able to write a new address to the decoder and control it but I am still unable to read the contents back.

Hi Nick, I'm not sure what you mean, there is a motor shield mounted directly to an Arduino Mega and the output from the shield goes directly to the programing track.

Thanks for the responses, I didn't know that about the load. The Zimo decoder Is working If I put the loco on the main track I can control it with the JMRI throttle but I still cant read or write o the decoder so any suggestions are welcome.

So after my adventures on this topic http://www.rmweb.co.uk/community/index.php?/topic/141517-dcc-on-rduino-mega/ I fitted a loco decoder to the DCC++ base station but I am unable to read or write any data to or from the decoder. JMRI just returns "No acknowledge from loco (308)" and the DCC++ processing sketch returns "Error - Reading Short Address Failed". I thought it may be the decoder, a laisdcc 4 function, so i have also tried it with a brand new out of the box Zimo MX600r and i get the same results. if the decoder is fitted to a loco, Hornby class 73, the motor twitches when JMRI tries to read all the CVs the voltage into the motor shield is 13.5v is that enough? I would appreciate any help as I don't know how to proceed now.

Thanks for the replies, I think I have solved it, there were a couple of things at play. As Alan said, according to the video, there should be a jumper from pin 4 to pin 13. However, for some reason my mega is spitting the DCC out on pin 2 not pin 4,? I worked this out by using the DCC monitor sketch from this page http://www.mynabay.com/dcc_monitor/ but plugging the output from my mega, without the motor shield, directly into pin 2 on the monitor arduino without the optoisolator. when I did this I could see DCC comming from both pin 2 and pin 12 on the mega. When I re-installed the motor shield I had the 4 leds, but when I took the output from the motor shield into the monitor arduino,through the optoisolator, I couldn't see any DCC so I thought I may have a faulty shield, even though I had been able to use the motor shield as a straight motor shield to control a DC motor. I thought maybe I had the diode in the monitor optoisolator circuit round the wrong way which was why I couldn't see DCC so I went to swap it round and when I removed it there appeared the DCC signal on the monitor. so now I can see DCC from the shield. Thanks for your responses, will have to try with a decoder now.

Hi all, I have been trying to get DCC++ running on an Arduino Mega but I am not having any luck. My question is should all 4 of the LEDs next to the motor shield terminal block be illuminated when the the track power is activated? At present only the three nearest the edge of the board are illuminated. If anybody uses this system I would be grateful to hear

Just about every other loco purchase I make these days seams to turn up with some sort of damage, it's usually minor and can be fixed with a small amount of glue so I can't be bothered with the agro of contacting the retailer, sending it back and then waiting at home again for another day for the delivery. Also what do you do when the courier arrives and the box has obviously had a knock, despite having handle with care labels plastered all over it, say your not going to sign for it until you've unpacked it, inspected it and given it a test run? It's very disappointing when you fork out your hard earned sponds and damaged goods arrive.

Is there any way to set the default location for saving and opening files in Templot? It's really annoying having to navigate from C/Program Files/Templot/etc etc etc to where I actually store my files even if I have already stored a file there.

I have tried using arduino and the L298 boards to control mitsumi motors (didn't want to try it out on an expensive loco). It worked well but there was an audible hum from the motor. Decreasing the pwm frequency I got excellent slow running control but still had the hum, Increasing the pwm frequency I got worse motor control but reduced hum. Has anyone managed to get good control with no hum?

I like the simplicity of this controler and would like to give it a go. I just have one question, your final picture shows the finished controler with an led that is not in the circuit diagram, what is it's purpose and how does it fit into the circuit. OK two questions. Cheers