Thursday 30 April 2009

Brafferton Update 22: Adventures in DCC Pt 2

A spiffing time was had at York show over the Easter holidays; operating Edward's layout "Niddbeck Bridge", looking at the various other excellent layouts and spending a bob or two.

Following my last post, I got some very useful feedback from those members who actually know what they're talking about in DCC. As a result the DMU was reprogrammed with one address for both chips and the lighting problem fixed quite painlessly. However, I was made aware how convoluted it can be programming a chip via a handset; the limited number of buttons on the LH90 for example make changing anything quite a chore. So with a little good homour intact, I dug deep and bought a Sprog whilst at York.

These wee beasties ain't cheap and they take some setting up (put the CD ROM in your computer which then tells you to download the software from the internet; what's all that about then?); however once up and running it was a revelation! Stick the chipped loco on the track and use the computer program to "read" all the settings; the program can even assess the kind of chip used. Store these on your PC. Change any setting; address, reverse mode, motor profile. All a simple and obvious click on the PC. There are some nice pages with graphs for acceleration profiles. I've not tried these yet, but as I become more proficient, I can see they will be useful. So all in all money well spent.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Tony,

The Sprog is definitely one of the best bits of kit I have ever bought and I haven't started using it in anger yet.

Mick

Nigel Cliffe said...

"they take some setting up (put the CD ROM in your computer which then tells you to download the software from the internet; what's all that about then?); "

The "download the software" bit is about keeping up to date; it would be hard work for a one-man maker to redo the CD everytime things change.

The main software (JMRI) is updated very regularly with a new versions every few months.

If a decoder maker changes something in a decoder then an update might be required for such a change. (eg: Zimo decoders have had at least four updates in the last year).

I've written a few decoder definition files which appear in the current JMRI releases.


JMRI does not require a Sprog to operate, it will work with most computer-to-DCC interfaces.
These interfaces cost from next to nothing (just a wire) to £100 depending on the command station maker.



- Nigel