ColinB

Great, Thanks a lot.

Do Hornby do the loco images as separate files? I know you can load them into the HM7000 App but I want to load them into the Z21 App.

I hate to say it but the UK is not the highest cost labour nor is it the most problematic anymore. You obviously are stuck somewhere in the 1970s. Read any newspaper/webpage and you will find as a country we are no worse than the rest. I read a report about the US and Germany suffering similar issues and Tesla had no issues opening a plant in Germany, although reading latest reports I suspect they are beginning to regret that now. To go on strike in the UK is extremely difficult with the latest labour laws, so please stop knocking this country and please don't believe everything you read. Most issues with the lack of working population is they don't want minimum wage jobs or zero hours contracts, they want meaningful employment which there is an increasing lack of. Right political bit over, sorry about the rant but I hate it when people are so negative. I have travelled many places with my job and you would be surprised how bad they are, try getting some work done during the Germans lunch break or moving the contents of you desk in the US without getting a fine from the Union responsible for normally doing it. As to moving production to the UK, who knows, I have made my feelings clear on numerous occasions.

No, unless they have changed the design lately. I tried them.

Their decoders may be clones but in this case they are not. Now whether I haven't found the company they cloned them from, but any decent analogue electronics can design one so I am sure they can. They also make four sizes ranging from large to small, which no other company does. Zimo and YouChoos do one you can populate with your own capacitors but the circuit is missing the all important switching transistor, which means it screws up programming mode. As I said I have tried several different makes.

96RAF stated that LaisDCC "stay alives" were not very good which is an incorrect statement, they are in fact very good. I only use them with my Zimo decoders. With my HM7000 decoders I either use the Powerbank or in the case of P2s and 9Fs none at all. Perhaps one day when I am brave enough, I might see if a LaisDCC works with a HM7000 having looked at both circuits they look very similar. I suspect the HM7000 just uses a software switch to enable it.

It is probably the "stay alive" in the Cavalex that is helping it. I fitted "stay alive" to my Hornby Jinty and was amazed by the effect.

It does and that is what I said, it is you guys that seem to be kicking up a fuss. I just pointed out the LaisDCC ones work perfectly well, which they do.

If you do it properly (read the Train O Matic description of their product) you need one pin for ground, one pin for Vref and one pin for the charging circuit. Now you can get round this by including the charging circuit on the "stay alive" pcb which is what they have done. As I said I didn't design it but if you wanted to truly control the charging rate that is how you would do it. The LokSound decoder has a separate pin for the charging circuit. Either way that is not how the current product works. As I said when I was looking at "stay alives" I did a lot of background reading and tried out many different products.

I know, that is what it says in the datasheet but I suspect either they put it in, in case they needed to use the three wire device or wanted to use the three wire device but found they could get away with only using two wires. People quite often explain away their reasons for doing something, when the truth is a lot different. As I said I didn't design it so I don't know. I do know I designed a lot of electronics and software and I always added connector pins just in case I needed that signal in the future.

Actually you are so very wrong, I use these an awful lot, they are probably one of the best on the market. You obviously have never used them. Strathpeffen's tutorial explains how to make one but the thing it doesn't do is explain how to overcome the issue of when you try to program the decoder. With a simple capacitor network strung across the Vref and Ground supplies you get the issue that it takes a while for the voltage to rise when power is applied to the decoder. So in the case of a programming pulse of power the decoder can never work properly because of that huge time lag. So you need some sort of intelligence. If you analyse the Powerpack and LaisDCC "stay alives" you will see that they contain a transister/fet/triac (not sure what) and a couple of other components that basically overcome this issue. Now some people tell me that they get the simple "stay alives" to work in programming mode, how, I must admit I don't know. They have never worked for me. I did take the Hornby Powerpack apart and considering it is supposedly controlled by the decoder the circuitry didn't back that up. There again I didn't design it so I don't know. I do think though that originally they meant to use the same type as the Train O Matic ones, which would explain use of the three pin connector. Anyway cutting to the chase, the Hornby one works ok as does the LaisDCC one. In the case of the LaisDCC ones you have to attach them between Vref and Ground rather that the 3 pin connector. Incidentally Digitrains initially guided me to LaisDCC ones as they said those and the Train O Matic ones are the ones they used all the time. The LaisDCC ones are cheaper.

Put the PDF through Google translate, exactly what I was looking for. Thanks.

Surprisingly since I spent a lot of time in Germany, non existent. Thank you though for the link, I can always use the Google translator. Seriously though, thank you for the information.

It is probably the front bogie, I have had many A1s that do that. It could be back to back spacing on the bogie wheels, the bogie bolt that holds the bogie to the bogie bracket is not long enough or you either need to add a light spring between the bogie and the bogie bracket. On some of mine I have had to add a spring on others I have had to remove it. Initially try measuring the distance between the wheels on the front bogie (back to back spacing) that is the favorite.

I must admit I was looking for a break down of commands so basically how the bytes are broken down. Seeing as the dongle seems to work on other platforms other than Hornby I wondered if there is a standard set of commands that is defined for all manufacturers.

Well perhaps they didn't realise that a HM7000 is basically a DCC decoder, so this model is no different to buying a Bachmann model with sound fitted. Trouble is people get carried away with the bluetooth capability ignoring the fact that as far as DCC is concerned not much different to TTS. Ok it is better sound and can be reprogrammed but it is just another sound decoder. The difference is that there is a big deviation from Hornby's other P2s in that the decoder also controls the smoke so if you don't like the HW7000 sound you can't just rip it out and replace it with a Zimo or LokSound decoder.

I hate to say it but other manufacturers manage to do it, we used to call it product planning. In our company they got paid extremely well for it, as the risks were recognised. Being as I have picked up various models at incredibly discounted price just lately, I get the opinion it is not working that well for Hornby anyway. As you say though, it does seem to be a trait unique to Model Railways. For me it doesn't matter much, I have as many locos as I will ever want so I doubt I will be preordering many more anyway.

Yes to you closely involved with the hobby you know that, for the average person that buys a catalogue or looks at a web page they don't. Hornby make it worse because they often put over optimistic release dates on their product. Nothing new though, Triang used to do it, I remember as a child being hugely disappointed to go round the toy shop and find the model had not arrived by the date stated in the catalogue. Most industries got rid of those practices once they had to face Japanese competition.

Thank youi.

Actually Bulliedboy that is a bit unfair, do you know exactly how long it takes to make things from design to production. It is Hornby's fault they announce new models generally before they have done the donkey work to work out how to make them. I worked on a two stroke Fiesta many years ago, it never made production but Ford never announced it would be making it. If they had they would have announced it when they were about to make it.

Actually 96RAF it is not, it just switches the steam off and on. The steam is a function of the algorithm within the decoder. So on Friday to clear the loco of water I basically had to drive the loco to generate steam to empty it. What I was talking about was a function to bypass the algorithm to just generate steam with the loco stationary just to empty the water.

Actually for once I am with Hornby. I was really surprised at how quickly it got released considering how long it takes to release a normal model. I was even more surprised that it works well. They could have perhaps told us that F24 switches the steam on or off, but I wonder if that was an afterthought. There again F24 is a long way up the function list so I suppose less people would have seen it and if they had defaulted it to off, then we would have had lots of posts on how do I get it to work. The original P2 without smoke was released ages ago so there was no wait for the model, in fact I now have two of them one with smoke I bought ages ago and this one. The only thing that concerns me is running it dry to put it back in the box, I am wondering if they could have included a function which basically keeps it smoking to get rid of the water.

I keep reading about Loconet and Xpressnet commands. I assume there is global set of commands defined for each, although I appreciate that individual implementation may be different. Is there a web page that lists the commands and format?

You have probably been lucky, if it had blown you would smell it plus it is guaranteed for a year. If you were into electronics there are ways you could make it work but the simple solution is just get the right equipment. You need to activate F1 to get it to smoke which you can't do on DC plus the amount of smoke is dependent on loco speed etc. so you need a computer (in this case the decoder) to work out how much smoke. If you have a "smart phone" then the decent power supply is the cheapest option. To be honest it doesn't matter whether it is half wave or full wave when you are talking about nasty spikes.

You are absolutely right Going Spare, that is exactly how I got into DCC, bought a Hornby loco with sound that would only work on DCC. In my case it wasn't so bad, I already had an Elite that I had picked up cheap because it needed fixing.