ColinB Posted August 22, 2022 Share Posted August 22, 2022 I recently bought a badly damaged loco that came with a Hornby DCC decoder. I managed to rebuild the loco and surprisingly it ran with the supplied Hornby decoder (they are normally broken). I have come to the point now where I want to put a proper address in it. Sadly the the reprogramming never works and I cannot read out anything from the decoder, address, manufacturer id. I have done the reset of the decoder but still it does not reprogram or read anything from the device. It will happily work with its default id of 3. I am using an Elite to do the programming and I know that it works as I have just done a program on a Zimo decoder. I have tried it in the loco and my DCC tester, it doesn't program in either. Did I read on this site that some early versions of the Hornby decoder suffered from this issue? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jupiter 1707822591 Posted August 22, 2022 Share Posted August 22, 2022 The early decoders were 2 digit addresses Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
P-Henny Posted August 22, 2022 Share Posted August 22, 2022 And as well as being limited to short addresses they are also 'write only'. These early Hornby decoders (if that is indeed what you have) are thus working as designed and not faulty. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ColinB Posted August 22, 2022 Author Share Posted August 22, 2022 That would explain a lot, I will try putting a 2 digit code into it. I was going to keep it for testing locos anyway but I was just surprised it didn't read back any values. The loco it came with was an early DCC version so that may explain it.Thank you for the information. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ColinB Posted August 22, 2022 Author Share Posted August 22, 2022 You are all dead right it has just programmed with an id of 16. Thank you all for the information. It is not that great as a decoder but at least I know I am not going mad. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
96RAF Posted August 22, 2022 Share Posted August 22, 2022 Does it have a paint dot on the MCU. Red, white, blue and if blue a big dot or a smaller dot in the corner. I can tell from that exactly which revision it is and what other ‘foibles’ it might have. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ColinB Posted August 22, 2022 Author Share Posted August 22, 2022 Well 96RAF it has one single white dot in the corner. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
96RAF Posted August 22, 2022 Share Posted August 22, 2022 As old as it gets ColinBlue dot would indicate R8249. Yours is definitely R8215.Although it says it supports short and long addressing it does not support CV 17/18. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ColinB Posted August 22, 2022 Author Share Posted August 22, 2022 Thanks 96RAF, I programmed it with an address so that is all I needed to do. The only thing I might need to do is reverse the direction, but rather than setting the CV, I will just turn the wires round. I am only using it as it was free with the broken loco. Anyway thank you for the help. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rpjallan Posted August 24, 2022 Share Posted August 24, 2022 That's very handy info to take note of... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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