RailMaster Version 1.70 now available on the download link

[RDS]

Further to the problem I referred to on the 9th March at 12:58, where the HH would not proceed past the start up screen, I sent an email to HRMS.  I have today received an email back stating that the port number was set incorrectly.  It should be port 30, I had it set on Port 1.

 

It now loads and works OK. 

Great support from HRMS, Thank you.

[Pietrarsa]

Pietrarsa

You can type any number in the COM port drop down. It takes its list from any ports that are active when RM reads them.

 

RAF

The weird thing is that when I first open the setting window, the available ports listed are only com1.

By accepting and causing the obvious error, when I reopen the setting window, here the real two available com ports are shown.

 

PS: that is for me more weird in a software, that I can write arbitrary things in a dropdown list that should be blocked, and there is no control on that. Have you ever tried to write DonaldDuck in the color scheme selection in RM? Have a try.

[96RAF]

Don’t have the laptop with RM on it fired up so cannot try the Donald thing, but my memory of setting up dropdown lists was to set a template of acceptable characters however in the case of the theme skins then only those possible and/or available within a AM or PRO package would ever be listed but for com ports the template format would be COMnn with nn being limited by the PC in use, most lappies have three, desktops four or six or more.

[RB51]

For those with tablet PCs struggling with the HH app, I would suggest you give up trying and use Teamviewer instead. .........  And if that's not enough, it's free. 

 

I downloaded Teamviwer with a little trepidation as the app store reviews were not very supportive. However, and based on only one test drive, I have found it to be excellent. Latency is not an issue - it was bearable for me anyway - but Teamviewer is much faster and all the signals respond perfectly with RM.

 

Thanks for the tip.

 

R-

 

[96RAF]

I have never used TeamViewer (as I don’t these remote access apps) but it has a reputation as the remote app to use, however the latest update gets very poor reviews for the iPad and iPhone as the ‘commercial use detected’ limitatation repeatedly kicks in restricting use to such short periods as to be useless for any practical purposes.

The app seems to have been broken by the last update, now where have I seen that claim before.

Maybe the laptop/desktop version is not broken yet.

[WilliamDavid]

I really hope people at HRMS are reading this thread, and reply soon in a way to fix things.

According to HRMS everything is just fine on this forum.

[96RAF]

I really hope people at HRMS are reading this thread, and reply soon in a way to fix things.

According to HRMS everything is just fine on this forum.

What we tried to do was generate a concise list of problems arising from v1.70 to put to HRMS but that seems to have been lost in the weeds.

[St1ngr4y]

Hi Pietrarsa,

 

I tried to reproduce your problem with the point number 0001, but without success. Judging by where the number appears, I think it is connected in some way to the green button closest to it, and therefore the point immediately above it. Is it possible you have another point or set of green/red buttons at that position? In layout designer, could you just move the green button  and the point temporarily, just to see if anything is hidden underneath?

 

Ray 

[train-domain]

Hi,

 

Ive been on to RM today about this handshake issue and they have spent well over 2 hours remotely connected to my computer and a lot of progress has been made. 

 

I will write up what happened along with conclusions and post it in an hour or so.

 

Thanks

[96RAF]

There has been a long running problem where artifacts are left when changing zoom. Reported several times.

[train-domain]

So after the initial hopes that everything was resolved yesterday, I powered up my system this morning to be greeted with the unable to handshake error message again.

 

If the loft had a window then the elink would probably have gone out of it when this appeared after I then spent the next hour or so trying to get a connection to the elink by using the workarounds that had worked over the weekend.

 

At this point I emailed RM support explaining the issue and to be fair they replied within the hour. After an initial exchange of emails requesting me to restart the laptop and check com ports etc etc, they requested remote access to investigate further.

 

Once remotely connected the support guy tried absolutely everything to diagnose the problem. He installed the very latest revision of RM and when that failed he went through the ini file making adjustments one by one restarting RM each time. He changed numerous settings on my laptop and re-installed the usb driver more than once with different versions. Then he erased my elink and re-installed the firmware.

 

Following this he opened the command prompt and literally went through it line by line until he found the issue.

After initialising the controller, RM initiates the the handshake with the elink which it reports as completed successfully and receives expected response so handshakes but then receives result 12 The access code is invalid or result 4 The system cannot open the file.

 

He made numerous changes to the software and re-installed RM at least a dozen times.

 

At this point I asked him if it was worth re-installing v1.69 to prove the elink and cable as this most definitely works but he was quite dismissive saying that wasn't possible as v1.70 didnt make any changes to comms between RM and the elink and that it was pure coincidence that this happened right around the time of the update.

 

I pointed out that others on this forum had reported the same issue and was told that of the thousands of elinks out there that only myself and 1 other had reported this issue.

 

The remote session ended with a request for me to load RM onto another laptop and email them back.

 

Before I did this I loaded v1.69 which connected immediately as I knew it would and I advised RM support of this and that I had simply over installed this version thus keeping the original ini file and hadnt even had to disconnect the usb cable or reboot laptop or power cycle the elink

I then loaded v1.71 onto the wife's laptop and immediately got the handshake error message therefore ruling out the laptop as the cause of the issue.

 

They also requested that I swap the power supply over from the Hornby 4amp to the 1amp supplied with the elink which I did and again made no difference.

 

So, they are of the opinion that this error is being caused by either a defective elink or usb cable, even though everything is OK with the previous version.

 

For the time being I am back to using v1.69 and am now waiting to receive a replacement elink and cable and will post the result as soon as they have been tested.

[96RAF]

Much of what you relate is exactly the point by point discussion I had with them. No remote access used as they didn’t ask and anyway I would not be happy with that.

History:

Try another PC - don’t have one.

Reinstalled previous version which works OK thus proving the hardware and PC. Confirmed using other controllers to prove its not one controller type.

Problem only occurred after this v1.70.1 update and is also there with different controller types...QED software fault as far as I am concerned. I have had beta v1.70.0 running for some time and that was OK. I think fortifying the HH comms on the release version has broken the basic comms.

Still waiting for HRMS to get back to me.

[train-domain]

I had no worries allowing them remote access as the laptop is only used for Railmaster and at least they could see exactly what we are seeing.

I forgot to mention in my previous post that I also completely uninstalled Bitdefender ruling out my AV as a potential cause.

 

I guess they have to eliminate the hardware because as he was making changes to RM he was testing it on another computer at their end and all was fine.

 

I agree its definitely software related. I really cant see that the elink or usb cable are at fault because everything is working with v1.69. Im wondering what the official response will be if it still fails to handshake with a new elink and usb cable?

 

I can see me making a call to Signatrak if this isnt resolved by the 15th when their new stocks of the Ace 2 are available as Railmaster has been a problematic from day one for me.

 

[trickymundo]

Hi all,

Thanks to train-domain and RAF96 for tremendous hard work trying to get to the bottom of this issue.

I made a decision to upgrade to 1.7 even after seeing some of the early issues reported earlier in the thread as I needed access to the extra functions on the TTS vent van.

If you guys have a "faulty" elink then so do I. I have Railmaster installed on a fully patched Windows 10 version 1809 on an all in one Sony Vaio.

When it works it is great. However I am getting handshake errors quite regularly upon starting Railmaster. This manifests as an 1154 error. There seems no pattern to it however. Neither does there seem to be a genuine pattern to fix it. Unplugging elinks USB cable doesn't always do it neither does removing the power from elink. Sometimes restarting the Pc is the only solution.

I did used to get Comms errors under 1.69. This was fixed by removing the USB cable.

Railmaster support really need to get to the root of this issue. I'm holding back on purchasing the pro pack and licences for my andoid devices. I would be willing to allow remote access to my Pc if that helps.

 

[Chrissaf]

@trickymundo,

I did used to get Comms errors under 1.69

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If you got comms errors under 1.69 that would be indicative of not doing my 'well documented on this forum' railmaster.ini modification.

.

Here is a link to one of my previous earlier replies. Look towards the bottom of my reply in this thread under the 'Railmaster.ini' check section of text. I'm not saying that this will cure your 1.70 comms issue, but it should cure your 1.69 comms issue (if the mod had not previously been applied) should you revert back to 1.69. I would still apply the mod if keeping 1.70 installed even if it doesn't cure the comms issue that seems to have been introduced by it.

.

https://www.hornby.com/uk-en/forum/railmastere-link-problems/?p=1

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PS - I would also use the inbuilt HRMS support reporting feature to report your 1.70 comms issue. They seem to think that very few users are affected. The more reports they get the better.

.

Question for the general readership:

All 1.70 comms issues reported in this thread so far seem to be eLink. Has anybody who has upgraded to 1.70 seen anything similar when using RM with an Elite?

.

[Pietrarsa]

I made a decision to upgrade to 1.7 even after seeing some of the early issues reported earlier in the thread as I needed access to the extra functions on the TTS vent van.

 

 

Maybe you can install 1.70.1 version, make a copy of the decoders updated files then reinstall version 1.69 and replace the files previously copied.

Maybe on this forum someone could be more specific of me on which file is related to decoder database.

[St1ngr4y]

@Pietrarsa

 

The file containing the loco function code data is func_en.dat.

 

Did you read my reply to your earlier post regarding point 0001 ?

 

Ray

[Chrissaf]

I would add however that copying files between different versions of the same application is a high risk strategy. You never know what software file dependencies the software author has included in them.

[St1ngr4y]

Oops sorry about repeating the whole of your post - that doesn't usually happen for me, and the Edit function won't let me get to the yellow bit to erase it.

 

Ray

[WilliamDavid]

Issue with Handheld still not resolved.

 

[Chrissaf]

Ray's post copied and reposted to remove the quote that he could not. See Ray's post next page.

.

@Chrissaf

.

Question for the general readership:

All 1.70 comms issues reported in this thread so far seem to be eLink. Has anybody who has upgraded to 1.70 seen anything similar when using RM with an Elite?

.

 

Hi Chris,

 

On the afternoon of Friday 8th March, and I think it was the first release of 1.70, RM lost contact with the Elite which in my case was attached to COM4. Looking in Device Manager there was no entry at all for COM4. I had been obeying the RM message of disconnecting the USB cable from the Elite, waiting 5 seconds, reconnecting and trying again, but without success. I rebooted (cold) the pc, to no avail. But then I switched everything off power-wise, including the Elite. I booted the pc up with the Elite disconnected, and opened up Device Manager. I plugged in the Elite and, yes, COM4 reappeared. I checked its properties and the baud rate was set to 9600 instead of 19200 so I changed that, brought up RM and everything was fine. Since then there has been no re-occurrence of this.

 

Ray

[Pietrarsa]

@Pietrarsa

 

Did you read my reply to your earlier post regarding point 0001 ?

 

 

Ray, I just checked once and now and also had a complete redesign from scratch of that zone of the layer, with no results. It only appears that point 1 and not both points "1". And it only appears at 75% zoom.

 

 

@RAF96

I also tried to input "Com2" by keyboard, but, of course, nothing changed and clicking green ok, the system didn't refresh, while the "choose-the-wrong-com-port / click-ok / system-refresh-with error / repoen-settings / choosing-the right-com-port / click-ok / system-refresh / com-handshaking / system-ready" algorithm does fix the problem.

[Ducky1]

I have installed 1.7 and 1.7 rev1 and have had no problem connecting to the Elite on Com3.

Ducky

[Chrissaf]

In Ray's post (last reply on previous page). He mentioned that with his Elite, as part of his RM upgrade to version 1.70 that Windows had arbitrarily changed the Baud rate of the driver in Windows device manager. I am just wondering if those who are experiencing eLink communications errors have had something similar happen.

.

To check, you need to open Windows Device Manager with the eLink connected, powered and driver loaded. Then 'right click' the eLink driver "USB Serial Port (ComN)" where N is the assigned com port number. Look for the configured Baud rate and confirm that it is 115,200......then check that this Baud rate is also set in the RailMaster 'System Settings' screen for the controller A eLink.

.

Probably nothing, but worth a check.....

.

PS - Thanks Ducky1 for the feedback on my question. I haven't taken the plunge yet and am still on 1.69.2 with an Elite. I don't use HH either.

.

[train-domain]

@ chrissaf Hi. I can confirm that in my case, no changes to the baud rate were introduced by v1.70 or revisions on either the Windows or RM settings.

 

I received an email from HRMS today regarding our lengthy remote session yesterday.

 

As previously posted, I loaded RM onto another laptop which still returned the handshake error when loading Railmaster.

 

Support have now requested remote access to both laptops to try and get to the bottom of this issue, where I will also be able to demonstrate to them the workarounds we have been using to get a connection. Im working over the weekend so this will have to be done on Monday.

 

I also managed to acquire an elink usb cable from work today to test and of course it made no difference but thats another hardware component ruled out.

 

In the meantime, Ive found a much easier way to get a connection without all the switching com ports.

 

Remove the elink cable from the usb and then open RM. Once loaded it will advise that it cant find the DCC controller and ask you to remove and replace the usb cable. At this point plug in the usb and RM connects immediately with no issues.

 

Will keep you up to date with any further developments.