Strange one, no solution

[St1ngr4y]

I have 50+ point addresses on my layout, which is controlled by Railmaster through an Elite. Most of my accessory decoders are ADS, but I have one R8247 also. There is one particular point, which has a Seep point motor connected to one particular port on an ADS8, which occasionally does not work after the system has powered up. It is unresponsive not only through RM, but also when operated directly through the Elite. A month or two ago, I found that it could be fixed by simply performing a unit reset on the Elite. I did not even need to unload/reload Railmaster - after the Elite reset, the PC/Elite connection re-established itself OK and everything worked fine. I wondered if the address of the port (0029) may have something to do with it, so a week or so ago, I re-addressed the port from 0029 to 0039, and changed all of my RM programs accordingly. Now, this morning when I powered up, this very same port failed to operate until I did another unit reset on the Elite.

Logically, the problem lies in either the Elite, or the ADS8 decoder - I favour the latter. However, I have had this decoder quite a while, since before the FX variety were introduced, so I think it is a little too late to try for a replacement. I also think there would be little point in reporting this to Hornby.

Does anyone know if, when a unit reset is done on the Elite, whether some sort of initialisation broadcast packet is sent out through the DCC output which may be kicking the ADS port back into life?

I created this thread simply to find out whether anyone else has encountered anything like this.

 

Ray

 

[Rog RJ]

Have you thought of trying the problem point motor on a different port on the point decoder?

[St1ngr4y]

Have you thought of trying the problem point motor on a different port on the point decoder?

Hi Rog,

Unfortunately, that ADS8 has no spare ports, but I could swap two points over physically and re-address their ports accordingly. I'll try that tomorrow and run with that for a while to see if the problem recurs.

Thanks for the suggestion.

Ray

[96RAF]

Still pondering on this Ray.

 

Given you could reset the Elite away from the track that would mean any data packet output from the unit from the reset would be lost and not seen by your acc decoder, but I don’t think an internal reset would broadcast any signal to the track.

 

The only thing I can think of is the Elite reset puts it back to Standard Mode and it may be that this refresh is getting your acc decoders attention again.

 

Resetting with the track attached would mean monitoring the DCC signal with a scope to see what is being sent from the unit if anything.

 

Rob