AndrewC

I was thinking more along the lines of all in one app. Yes you can use the browser for free. Engine driver for Android is free as is WiThrottle lite. The £5.99 for the full version though is well worth it. I've played with Engine Driver, Z21, and WiThrottle. My preference is for the latter as it is smart enough to pick up the loco information from Decoder Pro, so your mapped functions are all there. It is also the easiest for consisting locos. For Freemo meets my module has an iPad available for the conductor/switcher while the driver uses what ever throttle he/she wants. More interesting than finger poking the track. Another Freemo modeller uses a touch screen laptop running JMRI for switching.

No doubt others will be along shortly to add to the confusion useful comments but.... It really depends on what you are after. Want to be driver and signalman? If you have access to a laptop, you can use JMRI (free) to create a mimic display which in turn can be operated from the laptop, or with the addition of a cheap router (who doesn't have an old one kicking about these days after upgrading their broadband) you can, for a massive sum of £5.99 get your layout diagram to display on a smart phone or tablet. (WiThrottle) This would let you keep your existing DCC investment for little outlay. JMRI also lets you write macros for some automation. I use routes so that if I want a train from staging 1 to main track 1, I just select point 101, et voila the route is set. With a bit of simple scripting this can become similar to an entry exit function where you click one track then another in order to set the route. If you want to go whole automation hog then Z21 or ECoS with iTrain would be the way to go. That gives you wireless throttles if you want, along with full blown automation. That would be Mr Morrison's specialist subject.

A couple of other points. (pun intended) 1: are the points wired in parallel or series? If they are always going to be thrown in pairs, then wire them in series. That's why the Peco motors isolate each coil. 2: yes more oomph from the power supply. You may have enough voltage but do you have sufficient current. 12v with a 2a output is better than 19v with a 0.5a output. 3: how stiff are the motors and the point spring? When I used to use solenoid motors, I found that a bit of light oil on the moving parts of the motor as well as backing off the point spring to reduce the tension worked well. Have you tried throwing 2 points from the unit on your bench? If that works it is likely the points themselves are too stiff. As in the pic below a screwdriver is used to increase the distance between the tie bar and the spring retention clip. This reduces the force needed to throw the point but at the same time retaining the spring's function to keep the point blades pushed against the rails.

Greetings from the boring borough. Today is long low and slow BBQ day. 4kg of brisket about to get a good smoking over the next 12-14 hours. The other half of it is slowly curing into what will become Montreal Smoked Meat. (think part way between pastrami and salt beef.) I shall also be cleaning in preparation for double visitors at the end of next week. Although with the latter pair, we are both hoping the flight reductions at Gatwick will result in their flight being cancelled or diverted. I just can't deal with their drama at the moment. 30 years in the past and the ex is still a pain in the nether regions. We are only doing this for the offspring's benefit. Little else of note. Time to grab a latte and don my bbq apron. Enjoy the day.

Oops. Missed this. Happy anniversary Mr. and Mrs. Baz.

Greetings from the holy land. Or more accurately, the boring borough which now has a large sink hole on the eastern edge of the heath. Hole-y land? Not surprising given the geology of the heath. Loads of chalk, clay, and artesian wells and springs. The western edge is fairly unstable (also due to chalk and clay mining) which is why the East Wickham open space has never been built on. Rotherglen road in Plumstead is frequently closed with smaller holes. One of the reasons the Romans built the Watling road where they did and established a village in Welling is due to the availability of spring water. Musical talent + me = 0. Recorder in school as most had to suffer. A year of violin. I sucked. Mandatory singing in a music class. I was asked to sing over the hills and far away. I have a good ear and minored in sound engineering but can't translate the sounds into actual music. In other news, burger all happening here. More meetings, more coffee. Enjoy the day.

Greetings all from the boring borough. Condolences to Dave and his family. I'll just say I know what you are going through. When my dad died it was all in the same week as his birthday and Father's day. Pretty schitty timing. Half way through my week already. Today I shall mostly be watching my work laptop "upgrade" <cough> to Windows 11. At the present rate that will cover my morning pretty much. Some early plans being hatched for a few days camping next month. We shall see. I could actually use some down time. I'll be spending a lot of time over the next 10 days or so cleaning, moving crap around, and preparing a lot of BBQ. I'm doing a Canada Day bbq for friends next Friday. (Caesars, poutine, Montreal smoked meat, Alberta brisket, and some Canadian beers) Then on the weekend we have visitors staying with us for 3 days. Latte at the ready. Time to pretend to work. Enjoy the day

Blocked!

Craft Beer Co is hardly trendy anymore. 😃 Alesmith do some amazing beers but I wasn't impressed with their Reforged series. (No I didn't pay anything close to that amount.) That is still not even close to the most expensive UK beer. Brewdog's End of history was £220 for a 33cl bottle at 51%abv. Their Sink the Bismark was around £60 for a 33cl making that roughly £115 for a pint.

https://railroomelectronics.co.uk/Modules/Shuttle-Module/Product-88499.aspx

Good moaning from the boring borough. My you lot have been busy over the past 2 days. Still playing catch up. A belated Happy Anniversary to Tony and Aditi. Here is to many more. A grand weekend visiting the offspring in Carlisle was had. First Father's Day in 4 years that we've been together. I must have done something to appease the traffic gods as both the trip up and home were painless and quick. Our spare small Kamado bbq was delivered and they've taken to it already. Pulled pork on Saturday and pizzas yesterday. Another week of pushing ones and zeros about. Enjoy the day.

Moaning all from the boring borough. It is already quite toasty. Today I shall mostly be puttering about. First on the agenda is trying to discover why the shed air con isn't doing its job properly. The compressor is running, the fan is fanning, but the air is anything but conditioned. Online suggestions say first to look at the warm air vent hose to make sure it isn't blocked and feeding the warm air back through the unit. After that it is time to load up the Landy for the trip to the northern wastelands of Carlisle. We haven't seen the offspring for a few months so this will be a good visit. With the price of diesel, if it wasn't for the full load of cargo, we'd be on the train. I'm looking at about £200 for the round trip to cover the cost of the dino-p*ss . On the subject of vehicles the dealership where I bought the Landy keeps pestering me about trading it in as there is a massive shortage of used vehicles in their stock. Trouble is, if I want to replace it with the newest hybrid model, there is a 40 week, yes 40 week wait time to get one built. No doubt mostly down to the shortage of chips for all the onboard electronics. <sigh> Must dash, SWMBO is working from home today and wants another latte. Time to fire up the Sage. Enjoy your weekend.

"Oh freddled gruntbuggly, Thy micturations are to me As plurdled gabbleblotchits on a lurgid bee. Groop, I implore thee, my foonting turlingdromes, And hooptiously drangle me with crinkly bindlewurdles, Or I will rend thee in the gobberwarts With my blurglecruncheon, see if I don't!"

Happy Hoopy Frood day to Zarniwoop. Hopefully celebrating with a Pan Galactic Gargleblaster or 2. Now that I no longer work on Fridays, TFIT poetf doesn't quite work. Little of note. Back to spring watch. Yesterday we had our first goldfinch visit the birdy buffet. Either that or it was a sparrow wearing a red & black covid facemask. The employer has decreed that despite most people spending a lot of cash on decent equipment as part of their employment contracts, their policy of bring your own tech has ended. We've now been supplied with "laptops". Either Mac (I'd rather use an etch-a-sketch) or a Microsmurf Surface 4. I ended up with the latter. It sucks. My next purchase from the south American river people will be a usb-c hub, external keyboard, and hdmi converter cable. The actual laptop can live under the desk amongst the dust yaks. There are quite a few people (especially the newest starters) rather p*ssed off that they've just spent well over £1200 for a work device that is now redundant with an almost zero resale value. Time for coffee. Enjoy your day.

Morning all from the boring borough. Welcome to Springwatch. The alleyway foxes seem to have 2 younguns who have now started to explore a bit more. One spotted on the neighbour's garage roof last evening. We still leave out 2 buckets of water for them. They share with the local cat population. The local cats seem to ignore the foxes. There were 7 cats but one of the black ones hasn't been seen for a while. The only one that gives us any problem is a big fluffy ginger thing, who likes to sleep on the composter waiting for either a bird or mouse to appear by the feeders. We seem to have been adopted by a family of magpies. 2 adults and 4 juveniles. They are pretty harmless and are good at hoovering up the spilt bird food from the feeders. One of the youths is having trouble flying and manages to crash into the fence when trying to land on it. Interesting to watch the adults take a large chunk of a fat ball, dip it into the bird bath a few times, then feed it to one of the children. Strange that they'd still be doing this even when the young bird is flying and feeding itself. Other than the magpie family, the feeders attract the odd pigeon, many many sparrows, a family of great tits that live in the neighbour's bay tree, and in early spring / late autumn we have swarms of starlings. We did have a rare visit this morning from a pair of Bexley-keets. AKA ring neck parakeets. Normally they tend to stay further south and rarely stray north of Danson Park. One positive from the magpies is they seem to also like spiders. We have an over abundance of them outside. We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming. Enjoy the day.

This is the massive full sized one in Charlton that replaced the Telly Tubby branch a few years ago. Opens at 7. 8:30 on a Monday morning, zero cashiers.

Can I swap patisserie for beer please? Not really a big fan of baked goods or sweet things. (there I said it, out loud, now expecting the wrath of the white bear) On the topic of supermarkets and locking things down. It appears that Sainsbury's have taken to locking their till staff away in the morning. We were told yesterday that only the self serve tills were available until 10am. New policy supposedly. The threat of leaving a cart with over £250 worth of goods persuaded a manager to hastily open one manned check out. Now looking for a new place to shop after 18 years.

See also Monsanto corp and their control over the patents for genetically altered crops. Despite their assurances that the plants can't propagate with other "normal" varieties, it is happening. When it does, Monsanto goes in and tries to sue the farmer for using their patented seeds without a licence or permission.

It isn't just you. Too much sh*t in the world all at once, dragging many people down. Society is becoming more and more binary. Grey is vanishing. As you said agree or enemy. No tolerance or middle ground. Everything is becoming polarised and partisan. This little island of (mostly) tolerance is a welcome respite. Even on other parts of RMweb there seems to be a growing intolerance as if there is only ever one right answer to something or one way of doing something. @Tony_S The ethos in many oriental cultures seems to be that is is acceptable and honourable to use someone else's work as a starting point for their own. You see it in schools, business, and manufacturing. Invent something, and you can be sure there'll be a far east knock off on the market sooner rather than later. Way back in Uni we had no end of issues with a specific group of students who would "borrow" assignments, games, anything they could. Trouble was, they'd submit their cloned papers as quick as possible so the real author got called up on plagiarism. A habit of booby-trapping notes, drafts, and even floppy disks became the norm. One disk we created hacked some old DOS functions to make it look like a game was installing, while it was actually low level formatting their hard drive. Cruel but effective. None of that group made it past the second semester. Another day of meetings that could have been post-it notes awaits. Time for coffee. Enjoy the day.

The McAffee stuff in the form of emails and pop ups has been going on for a while. If you see one when browsing, it is because the website you are using has been compromised or has allowed the dodgy code to be run. The technical term is Malvertising. Malware in the form of an advert. If you have proper anti virus AND anti malware running on your computer you won't see them. If you only have anti-virus, then the nastier bits of these malverts can't take hold. An ad blocker doesn't help. Good moaning all from a rather pleasantly warm boring borough. Last couple of days have been pretty wasted as far as being productive. I did manage to catch up with some friends in the pub Friday afternoon, and SWMBO enjoyed the Section 25 gig Friday night. Yesterday I accomplished the sum total of b*gger all. As for today, who knows. Right now it is time to fire up the espresso machine, have a latte then get brekkie on the bbq going. I may also manage to grab the clippers and shear my head now that my hair style could best be described as "mad scientist". With recent changes to my work schedule and the company moving our pensions, thoughts have turned more and more to downsizing and other things that old f*rts do. Last year's plans to do more camping haven't happened so there is a large amount of gear that could be disposed of. One of the BBQs is going to the offspring next week so, one down 4 to go. Likely one of the other kamados and/or the Weber will be sacrificed on the alter of de-clutter. We've got far too much crap now and I'm also seriously considering selling off all the model railway gear apart from maybe a few bits. With the knee and other clapped out joints I know that I'm not going to be able to manage moving an exhibition layout around or even attending future Freemo events. (one going on right now that I'm missing) SWMBO is having difficulty keeping up with the garden despite its small size. Perhaps a micro layout and some potted plants in a senior's flat is our future. We shall see. Enjoy the day.

On the other side of the coin, developers use deterioration as a quick(ish) method for being able to bypass listings and other protections. A couple of "accidental" discrete holes in roofs, give it a year or so, et voila, a condemned structure that has to be knocked down. This is similar to the ruse of stripping out a recently profitable pub and then claiming it is now unsustainable as a pub due to the costs involved in restoring it. It also makes it nearly impossible for a section 4 (asset of community value) to find a group to take over the pub. Poison pill or salted earth methodology. Then again, some just knock things down and hope the cost of the fine is less than the cost of waiting/going through hoops was. That has backfired a couple of times now with councils ordering the complete rebuilding. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlton_Tavern,_Kilburn

As he has mentioned they are Tsunami and Economi decoders. These are notorious for not playing nice with Digitrax (and some other older system's) programming tracks.

For those you definitely need a more powerful programming track. I'd recommend the PR3 or PR4 if you can borrow one, and use direct byte for programming. I had the same issue with early Rapido locos which had Tsunami decoders. FYI. JMRI is a suite of free applications for use with DCC systems. It allows you to hook up your system to a computer and it really makes decoder programming a simple task since just about every possible decoder has a definition file that lets you just set the address, build a speed curve or acceleration rate, etc etc.

I always thought he was barking. Oh come on, someone was going to say it eventually.

What type of decoder? Some need more oomph than the programming track output of the DCS is capable of. EG: Loksound and Tsunami all need more. I use either the Lok programmer, or a PR3 with external power to get around this. Also check the type of programming you are doing. (paged, phys, or direct) Digitrax defaults to paged mode, but a number of decoders only respond to direct byte. Check with you manual to see how to change this if not using JMRI.