WIMorrison

Do you mean Kapton?

Not yet Bill, but expected to be below the other motor with the inbuilt decoder ;)

In your position I would watch this and modify all your motors before installing them 71. Tortoise Point Motor Failures at McKinley Railway

Yep, and we proved at McKinley that they are a straight swap for the Tortoise, no need to change anything, just cut the Tortoise wiring, screw onto baseboard, connect the wiring into the MP10 plug and off you go 😂 EDIT - I should have also mentioned that MTB will be manufacturing a new version that will have an in-built decoder for DCC users soon. I have seen the pre-prod models and they are extremely tempting and so much better than other slow action motors with in-built decoders 😉

Rather than Tortoise motors take a look at the MTB MP10 motor which is a direct replacement for a Tortoise - even down to the screw mounting holes. It has exactly the same foot print and using real microswitches will not suffer from the known weakness with Tortoise when the plastic goes brittle and the sliding contacts fail. MTB MP10 point motor

You really need to sort your wiring out. You now have red, brown and yellow all with the same ‘polarity’, which is why you, and your electronics experts got it wrong. You only need two wire colours, one for each rail and doing as I suggested earlier it will prevent (or help prevent) more errors in the future.

Because you haven’t wired it correctly- the other possibility is that you have ruined the YD6016 with your previous incorrect wiring.

Clearly you haven’t followed the diagram because thousands of other have followed it and it works perfectly.

just follow the picture that is shown in the YD6016 manual (link provided earlier). If you consistently use only two colours of wire then you will find it a lot easier - I certainly will because I see black, black/red, yellow and brown wires in you pictures. Just use two - black and yellow would ne a good idea as you will be able to work out where the fault is. I certainly cant from your description and pictures, but I am 99% certain it is simply that you have a crossed wire, therefore a short.

Sound like you have some wires crossed - literally. I suggest that you check that you have the left and right rail wire the same way around everywhere on the layout.

Yes, you are simply measuring the parallel resistance of all the items you have connected across the track bus. Assuming a track voltage of around 15v you are drawing around 0.03mA, which is absolutely nothing to worry about.

The Loconet is cable should be connected to the LNet port on the Z21

Block signalling make one and given that the rest of their stuff works well, I would imagine this will perform well also 😀 https://blocksignalling.co.uk/SDCC1

You should be aware that many Bachmann decoders are actually made by Zimo - look on the little box they come in and you will see the Zimo logo 😉

Not sure what you have looked at, Zimo make some of the best decoders out there - especially for what you say you want, and so much better than the ones you have added to your post since I originally commented, neither of which I would put in any of my models.

Look at the Zimo range -available from lots fo suppliers

http://www.yamorc.de/downloads/YD8116.en.pdf

Nope, that is why you need to use USB, until the YD9401 becomes available, or the YD7101 command station successor is produced. There are far to many options and configurations to be able to do it using DCC CVs

Because you need to configure it ... 😉

overkill for a single unit, great if you are creating a DC bus to feed multiple items at a later date

You buy one of these http://yamorc.de/products/?singleproduct=1261

Correct, but if you do a direct connection you will need to put in a static IP address into the laptop. i suggest 192.168.0.100, with a 255.255.255.0 subnet.

An interesting challenge that is a bit more complex under the surface than it might appear on the top. I agree that the use of RFID is possibly the only solution that will answer the DC and DCC identification though it does then beg the question of what software you will be using for the automation as that software will need to be able to use the RFID tag information to either display the tag ID or better, to read the tag ID and then use that in a lookup to display the actual train name on the output device(s). It may also be useful to display the decoder ID for the DCC system. DC might want to use some other form of ID. Train Positioning can be done reasonably accurately in DCC, with the appropriate software, to certainly +/- 10mm and decent software will allow you to adjust the tag position on the loco relative to the front and back of the loco. You may also be able to use the tag for ID of the wagons which is what McKinley does. On the software from there are open source programs - JMRI and Rocrail as the main contenders that will work for DCC, and commercially iTrain and TrainController. but the RFID integration is, for me, an unknown presently, though iTRain is considering it as a potential for iTrain v6.x and I think JMRI is also considering it. These will not work with DC - unless you are using Dinamo from VPEB, but that is far from cheap! For positioning I suggest you also consider Light Dependent Resistors (LDR) which can be bought as complete boards ready for use from China for 70-90p per board - and the light sensitivity is adjustable on them.

Nigel, if the home wifi is using 192.168.0.x the I agree you need to switch the WiFi off, however if the home network is using a different network then it won’t be an issue as the laptop will route the two networks to the appropriate port. and if the home network is 192.168.0.x then you can simply connect the Z21 into the home network 😀 ( though advisable to exclude 192.168.0.from the DHCP range)

I assume that you have the Z21 connected to the TP Link router using a cable. You should then connect the laptop to the TP Link router either using WiFi or cable. In both cases if you are using the Roco supplied router then the correct address will be issues to enable the laptop to connect correctly to the Z21 using 192.168.0.111 as the Z21 address. if you are using another router ie not the supplied router you may need to change the IP address range within the router to 192.168.0.x