Juxtaposing Controllers in RM Setup (Problem Resolved)

[96RAF]

I was not seeing any response to loco or points commands in RM, so I checked all settings and found that although Elite is on Com 3 and eLink is on Com 4 in Dev Mgr and RM setup, somewhere in RM doesn't agree.

I have tried swapping the USB cables over and that gives me 2 x eLinks notified in the RM track plan top right-hand icon and at the bottom of this setup window. A tad flummoxed.

Anyone got any bright ideas.

Edit - I have just opened a different train operating software and see this...

My PC has really got its wotsits in a twist.

[westernwill]

Is there a fault in the Elite.?

Does it work Ok when not connected to RM ?

[96RAF]

Yes Elite runs locos fine direct.

This has happened since my PC failed to boot due to a faulty backup drive. Since disconnecting that drive the PC boots fine but then I noticed no loco response from RM or the other package.

I suspect something wrong with the USB ports. I may have to delete them in Dev Mgr and let them be refound.

[96RAF]

Embarrassed to say the least - total finger trouble being the root cause of this problem.

I had 2 x USB3 ports feeding the Elite and eLink (as com 3 and com 4) provided by a plug in PCi daughter board, one port of which went flaky on me a while back, so I bought a new board and installed it alongside the old one, which gave me com 7 and com 8. I kept com 3 on the old board and used com 7 from the new board. All was well. My PC case is marked to show the com port numbers to aid plugging in the marked cable from the controllers.

As I was still getting occasional USB connection errors, I decided to ditch the old board and move the new board into its place to regain com 3 and com 4 allocation, but I failed to notice that the new board was allocating com 4 and com 3, the reverse of before, hence when I plugged my marked cables into the marked slots, I was simply cross connecting them.

Swapping the USB cables over and remarking the PC case has resolved the problem.

Moral of the story - no matter how experienced you are, it is easy to make basic errors and waste lots of time chasing the tail of something that wasn't a real problem in the first place.

As an aside whilst fumbling around inside the PC case I must have tipped my old back up HDD over the edge because it died, which stopped the PC booting - a problem I have seen before, so I disconnected it for now and the PC boots up as before. This has led me to buy an SSD to replace the main HDD and that will go into the back up slot in place of the expired one. Expense and extra work I did not need, but it would have had to be done eventually.

[Fishmanoz]

Definitely keep roundy/roundies for the layout these days.

I still remember the first HDD I bought and installed in what was then a dual floppy PC. I got the big one - 30Mb - 30 megabytes not gigabytes. Soon discovered the RLL technology used on these drives was most unreliable and you could extend the life of the drives by reformatting them back to 20Mb. You lost all the data but saved a trip to the computer shop.

if you were wondering, that was in 1988.