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greslet

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Blog Comments posted by greslet

    Midland Lad

    Posted

    I like your ideas, and I'm looking forward to following the progress. I too am building an inglenook right now, and I'm already envious of that professionally made baseboard. I was looking at these boards at railex Ne on bank holiday weekend and am very tempted to buy for my next project.

     

    Happy modelling

     

    Kevin

     

    Www.railwayblog.kevinappleby.co.uk

    greslet

    Posted

    Update……..

    I’ve been back to th RR&co website and discovered that despite being listed in the price list as items to purchase, it is possible to download these for free. A quick look at the Bronze manual suggests the software will run without a license, so I’ll download a copy and have a play. The manual also shows some functionality available in bronze that I’d assumed from the limited info on the website would probably require silver.

    Maybe this could be a lower cost venture than I had first assumed?

    greslet

    Posted

    Hi,

    Did you explore using RR&Co software prior to going down the JMRI route? I only ask as it is extremely well suited to meeting your brief of wanting to achieve prototypical operation. By this I mean full interlocking of points, block sections and signals, whilst running a complex timetable. The system can also be designed to allow for any number of human operators to work alongside the computer control, either acting as as drivers of locomotives, or signalmen.

    I like your conclusion of using block sensors for detection, as again, this is more prototypical. You could also use very short block sections for accurate stopping of trains if you wished.

    Hope the above is helpful

    Best wishes

    Mike

     

     

    Mike

    Thanks for the reply, I note what you say about RR & Co with interest, and yes I have thought about RR & Co, but its only in the last couple of months I’ve had a machine able to run it. As far as I’ve been able to tell RR & Co is windows only software and I’m a mac user for most stuff and the ancient pc in the railway room runs linux. JMRI has been my choice for ages as it runs happily on these machines and over the years Ive used more and more bits of it, for example it was the only package for quite a while that allowed the use of a mobile phone as a throttle. (I was involved in the user testing of WiThrottle before it was publicly available and have loved using it ever since the first day it arrived as a beta version on my iPhone)

    I’ve heard of people giving up on JMRI and moving to RR&Co to achieve automation, but these folk always seem to refer to JMRI versions of several years ago and the software has developed hugely since then.

    Now I have the ability to connect a windows pc to the layout I’ve taken another look, but so far I’ve been put off by the price, having preferred to spend available funds on decoders and detection devices. As far as I can see it doesn’t seem possible to try the software without buying it and there aren’t even any manuals available online to have a look at to get some idea of what it does. To do what I want seems to need at least the silver version (£300+), and since I can find no technical information I have no idea whether this will actually suffice or whether I’ll need the gold version (£500+).

    The RR & Co website is shocking, obviously originally written in German and badly translated into English, and is a marketing exercise with virtually no technical information on the product, or at least none I’ve been able to find. So far this has put me off wanting to look any further, but hearing what you say about its capability I’ll keep an open mind. If you can point me to any manuals or the like I’d be very interested.

    Re using short blocks for exact stopping, I had thought of that but I need to use the dozen or so Irdots I’ve bought to do something! ( I suppose I could always sell them on ebay to fund more block detectors)

    greslet

    Posted

    Have you looked at asymmetric DCC, this uses feedback from the chip for automation, an explanation here http://www.tonystrai...enz-asy-abc.htm

    Also railcom,

    http://www.dcc4pc.co...ilcom_uses.html

    http://www.lenzusa.c...echinfolist.htm

     

    I actually chose Lenz as my DCC system because of these technologies, expecting a good amount of development to take place around them. So far that doesnt seem to have happened, Basic assymetric DCC seems to be OK at stopping a train at a defined place, but so far Ive not seen it do much more than this.

     

    Railcom looks as though it might have promise, but it isnt something that my software package supports. I actually note with interest that the Hornby DCC system has got this feature, and they are pushing computer software. I briefly spoke to Simon Kohler a week or two ago at the Hartlepool exibition, and he gave a broad hint that Hornby had a new piece of software in the wings that would handle more automation. I wonder if it will use Railcom especially as the Hornby DCC system has no feedback bus.

     

    Railcom appears to operate in a similar way to block detection, with the layout physically split into sections and power to each fed through a railcom module, in much the same way as a block detection module. The added bonus is that the decoder can feed back information, using the DCC bus for communication rather than a separate feedback bus which will only report whether a given sensor is on or off. The advantage seems to be that the section can detect not only that there is a train in it, but which one it is, however the train tracking software on the computer should have managed to work this out for itself without needing this information. I can see a disadvantage that all Railcom tells you is that the engine is in the section, and from the details I've read it won't detect the full train. For automation purposes this is a problem as you will have no idea when the train has left the previous section and it is clear for the next one.

    • Like 1
    greslet

    Posted

    Andy - No problem, in future I'll cut and paste more of the blog entry into RMWeb.

     

    I'd much rather be chatting here about the relative merits of the two engines, which was the whole point of blogging about them in the first place than discussing the merits of links to external sites.

     

    I'm not sure I quite follow why you have an issue with external links, my browser has a "back" button Which I use when I go to something I don't like.

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