Friday Night - Wiring & Problem Solving...

So this Friday night just gone I had some good friends over to help out with the wiring of the fascia mounted push buttons for the tortoise motors.

Noel & Dennis are both N scale guys but seem to enjoy getting there fix of HO, they both enjoy switching the L&T Branch and are always willing to help out and enjoy a catchup and chat.

So when I installed the LocoNet in the last post I began the process during the week of programming the board ID's into each BDL & SE8C,  this process went reasonablily well until the second last board.  I have 8 x SE8C's and 3 x BDL's (which will expand out to 5) and the second last board wouldn't program.

So Dennis began wiring the Cat6 cable to the push buttons, and Noel and I tackled the issue with the second last board, because Noel has a full Digitrax layout I was hoping to be able to use use his DT400 throttle to directly program the problematic SE8C.  We checked the LocoNet through the JMRI LocoNet monitor and all the other boards and LocoNet was working well and showing good data flow.

I did notice that the return data path for the LocoNet did have to travel the whole way around the layout so I, I re wired it and shortened the path.  But still had the issue with the SE8C, through elimination we actually discovered that the SE8C has a bad pair of RJ6 connectors.  So we took this board out of the LocoNet and the issues were gone, after some extra attention to the terminals and some cleaning we did manage to get the board programmed to it's needed ID#2.

But alas when reinstalled back into the LocoNet the issue came back and the board was hard to get a full read of all Ops switches through JMRI/Pane Pro and it slowed down the LocoNet traffic again.  So it's off to Digitrax with a BDL FOR SOME "goof proof warranty work".

So a very productive night of solving issues, wiring and an enjoyable catch up and chat to see how everyone was and upto.

Jas...