I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious
DCC is a digital signal and therefore black magic and wizardry to a lot of old-school model railroaders out there.
But when you take a closer look it’s not that hard to understand. It’s all bits and bytes in a certain order that actually make perfect sense.
So let’s take a class at the Hogwarts School of DCC Wizardry. I have made a video about DCC Packets. In this video, I’ll analyse the DCC packet stream using cheap USB logic analyser
I have more model railroad videos on YouTube.
Since I don’t really have space for a model rail layout, I tend to mess about with small model rail related projects. One of the aspects about model rail I genuinely enjoy is the automation side. Interfacing the physical with the digital world is a heck of a lot of fun. Using European Uhlenbrock equipment goes hand in hand with LocoNet.
Loconet is part of a DCC train control system designed by Digitrax to control a model train layout. LocoNet is a Peer to Peer Local Area Network (LAN) designed for very high traffic capacity and free-form wiring as well as future system expandability and ease of upgrade. It is a separate circuit from the track power used to run model trains.
Digitrax developed LocoNet to handle the communications between throttles, stationary decoders, and other devices that need to communicate with the command station.
I have an
Intellibox Classic which works fine. What has always disappointed me the about the Intellibox is the ramshackle feel of the buttons.
N
ormally, I mainly drive using Rocrail and hardly touch the Intellibox. The keys that I use the most are the red and green stop and go. The ones located top right, under the logo. They send the LocoNet OPC_GPON & OPC_GPOFF commands.