dauntless Posted August 26, 2018 Share Posted August 26, 2018 I know Railmaster is designed to work with the Elite controller or the eLink unit. Has anyone used it successfully with a differrent interface unit? If so, what and did it work well? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chrissaf Posted August 26, 2018 Share Posted August 26, 2018 No.....If they have been successful, then they have never posted a comment to confirm that on this forum. RailMaster is totally proprietary to Hornby. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dauntless Posted August 26, 2018 Author Share Posted August 26, 2018 OK Thanks for that. It is what I assumed would be the case. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
96RAF Posted August 26, 2018 Share Posted August 26, 2018 A long time ago a guy on another forum back-engineered RM with the pure intent of making the eLink respond more efficiently, but despite making good progress he fell foul of the RM licence agreement such that the forum admin had no option but to take the whole thread down, so there is no accessible record of his substantial progress. If you can find a controller that uses the same protocol then you may be able to make it work. E.g Rocrail and JMRI both cater for all types of controller so why not RM apart from wanting to keep it restricted to in-house Hornby kit. Rob Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RobinJ Posted August 26, 2018 Share Posted August 26, 2018 The information on how the e-link talks to railmaster is no longer available, however it is very easy to find it out by using a USB protocol monitor. https://github.com/networkfusion/XpressNetSharp is an open source Elite (and e-link with magic boot packet) compatible library no reverse engineering of railmaster was ever carried out, only the monitoring of communication. JMRI and ROCRAIL both support the Elite, but not the e-link due to the said packet being missed, however you can connect to it using RM before connecting to it with another Elite compatible product as it uses the same protocol after it is initialised... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
96RAF Posted August 28, 2018 Share Posted August 28, 2018 The information on how the e-link talks to railmaster is no longer available, however it is very easy to find it out by using a USB protocol monitor. https://github.com/networkfusion/XpressNetSharp is an open source Elite (and e-link with magic boot packet) compatible library no reverse engineering of railmaster was ever carried out, only the monitoring of communication. JMRI and ROCRAIL both support the Elite, but not the e-link due to the said packet being missed, however you can connect to it using RM before connecting to it with another Elite compatible product as it uses the same protocol after it is initialised... If you are that guy Robin then my apologies. It was a long time ago and I forget the details but reverse engineering was mooted as the reason for site Admin pulling the thread, which I found very interesting. I have tried eLink on Rocrail as a straight swap for my Elite and as a second controller. On screen monitoring within Rocrail showed eLink was causing Rocrail to send commands five times, evidenced also by my points relays clattering in synch with the commands. Asking questions of the Rocrail forum got the standard ‘anti-Hornby kit‘ reply, i.e sell the toy train kit and buy proper model railway kit, so I gave up any further trials as the Elite works well In the application. Rob Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
96RAF Posted September 1, 2018 Share Posted September 1, 2018 I found a PM from the other site and the guy involved with the RM ‘improvement’ was ‘netfusion’.Rob Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RobinJ Posted September 7, 2018 Share Posted September 7, 2018 All I can say is that the person involved has given up trying to improve his trainset for the moment... There are other projects and communities which are more open to improvement... There is still some beta software lying around somewhere which may be improved in the future but unlikely based on hornby. It is a shame as his son now thinks "Thomas is for babies". Personally the nicest GUI I have seen in a while is iTrain (unfortunatly not compatible with hornby, is written in dreaded java and is not open source) which is what I wish RM would look like some day (take note hornby...). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
96RAF Posted September 8, 2018 Share Posted September 8, 2018 Thanks for the cryptic concurrence Robin. Rob Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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