Installing sound apps HM7000

[Keith-350540]

Excited to receive my 8pin decoder now fitted to my Flying Scotsman, I have started the app installing process all seems fine but every time i download the sound files it says Error process crashed at prepare state. is there something I am doing wrong?

[Railbob]

Keith , what power supply are you using? If you are using the supplied power controller, from a set, then this may be the problem. I had lots of issues trying to load my chip using the supplied controller so ended up having to buy the R7737 which works an absolute treat.

Railbob

[SteveM6]

Also what tablet/phone are you using and which version of Zion is loaded?

[P-Henny]

As a concurrence to the reply made by Railbob.

Purely based upon my observations from reading many posts on this forum for which I have no personal experience. It seems to me that many posters that don't have sound file loading issues are members that are predominately using pure DC or in some cases DCC for their track power. It seems to me that a lot of the ones who have issues are using DC Analogue controller outputs for power.

It has been posted elsewhere that despite previous Hornby documentation to the contrary, it is now recommended by Hornby that DC Analogue 'set' controllers are not used to provide track power for HM7000 decoders.

[SteveM6]

In addition to your last point, a strong WiFi signal for your phone or tablet is needed. Any WiFi dropout will stop the download.

[ColinB]

To be honest I know very little how the Hornby app works but I worked on flash reprogramming of automotive electronic control units for years. With our software routines we had tons of software to recover if the download missed a load of download bytes, in fact it usually tried 3 times. I suspect this software doesn't. Most times it will work but occasionally at periods of high network traffic it fails.

[96RAF]

I would expect any software to have a check-sum toutine.

[ColinB]

It is an awful lot more complicated than that, all the checksum does is tell you that you have got it wrong, which probably terminates the download. In our software they were frame numbers indicating which frame was wrong and as such asked the sender to repeat the frame. There is an awful lot more but I am not going to go into it, I have been here before. The good news is though it doesn't "brick" the module, so you can try again. We had an ABS module where the Supplier got it wrong, I had a pile of about 10 under my desk, only useful as plant stands. That is why I said I will be very interested when the Android app uses go online.

[Clement Matchett]

I am pretty sure that most of the problems people are experiencing in loading sound profiles are due to Wi-Fi issues, as SteveM6 said.

Despite being on an 80 mps loop here in rural Shropshire, I have had some problems loading up sound onto my new William Whitelaw. But I also have another A4, which does have sound. When I exported the sound profile (SD0380 from that and imported it into William Whitelaw, it worked first time.

I assume that was a Bluetooth transfer, not a Wi-fi one?

[ColinB]

I suppose the big question is how does it work. We know from the times it takes to reprogram the decoder the sound file must be big. So does it copy the complete sound file to the host bluetooth device before it does a reprogram or does it copy the file chunk by chunk (so many bytes at a time). Interestingly a reprogram time or over 2 minutes used to get me worried when I did it as a job, I mean your phone to update itself only takes about a minute (well mine does). We know from Sams tests if if loses bluetooth communication, if it does recover it takes a long time, that is more than enough time for the reprogram to "time out". On one occasion it didn't recover at all, so imagine if it was loading a sound file and lost bluetooth communications at that point.

[96RAF]

There is a trouble shooting write up to follow in the text based how-to section of additional manuals

https://support.hornby.com/hc/en-gb/article_attachments/8326626694812/HM.DCC___HM7000_-_Troubleshooting__3-4-2023_.pdf