Turntable Timing in Railmaster

[St1ngr4y]

Here's something for users of a R070 turntable controlled by Railmaster. Do you have problems whereby the turntable gets out of sync, in that it stops midway between two access tracks. About 18 months ago, I was experimenting with my turntable, and I discovered what I believe is a fundamental flaw in the way that Railmaster handles the operation of a turntable. When there is an icon on the layout diagram to operate a turntable, the user must click the icon once for each road the turntable is to rotate. The right-hand side of the icon is clicked for clockwise, the left-hand side for anticlockwise. Each time it is clicked, a number is displayed on the diagram next to the icon, indicating the total number of roads to be rotated. The INI file has two entries for a turntable - speed and timer. The timer entry defines how many seconds the motor is to be run for each inter-road movement. As soon as the icon is clicked for the first time, the motor starts and the number "1" is displayed near the icon. Subsequent clicks cause the number to be incremented with each click. HOWEVER, it is my belief that the stop time for the first movement is being reset to "Current time" + "INI timer" each time the icon is clicked. So for example, if the INI file has, say, 20 seconds as the timer value, and the icon is clicked 8 times at one second intervals in order to rotate through 180 degrees, then the motor will run for 27 seconds for the first movement, then 20 for each of the other 7 movements. This behaviour can be displayed better if the icon is clicked more slowly i.e. say, once every 5 seconds. In this case the first movement will last a full 55 seconds instead of 20.
I reported this through the RM help system 18 months ago, but, several new versions later, the problem still exists. During the email conversation I had with them at the time, I also queried why it was necessary for RM to actually stop the motor for a second or so at each intermediate track i.e. if the icon is clicked, say, 3 times, why not just run the motor continuously for 3 x "ini timer" seconds?

Their answer was ...

"We have run the motor at different speeds and there is a substantial mismatch of the roads alignment if we do not take the acceleration/deceleration of the chip into account. We spent many hours during development to test and work on this.

Mathematically we cannot have the motor run continuously through the roads."

 

Incidentally, if you execute a "Clockwise 8" command for a turntable in a program, the same thing happens - the first movement is 7 seconds longer than the INI timer value.

 

Has anyone else noticed this or wondered why frequent re-synching of the turntable is needed?

 

Ray

[westernwill]

Hi Ray

 

I experimented with my R070 Turntable and found the same thing happened. I waited 10 seconds before clicking again and the first movement then took 10 seconds longer than the entry in my ini file.

 

Never noticed it before, but I have noticed that I have to occasionally resync the turntable. I don't use it all that much so never really thought about it.

 

The only way round would be to just do single steps and wait until each one had finished. Not so bad in a program but a bit of a pain manually.

 

Bryan

[St1ngr4y]

Hi Bryan,

Thanks for taking the time to check that for me. I was beginning to think the Forum had been abandoned due to holidays, the World Cup, Wimbledon etc.

 

I do most of my opearting via programs and I usually use loco commands "Forward/Reverse to Cruise" and "Stop" to operate the turntable, rather than the "Clockwise/Anticlockwise" commands for a turntable.

 

But this fault would affect someone who uses the icon on the layout diagram. Suppose you click the icon three times fairly rapidly, but after 10 seconds or so of the first track movement, you decide it should have been 4 instead of 3 tracks to move, and you click the icon once again. RM accepts this and adjusts the numeric counter on the screen from 3 to 4, BUT the timer for the first track movement restarts when this fourth click of the icon occurs, even though the turntable motor has been running for 10 seconds already.

 

Ray

[RDS]

Is anyone else able to check if the issue raised by Ray and confirmed by Bryan is indeed a common problem, or are using a different method to overcome it.