Stretters8

I have mixed emotions of trying to set-up and use our first HM7K chip so far. We have the NRM R2441 flying scotsman, so when we heard that a specific profile was available we ordered a chip. When the chip arrived we had to wait two weeks for the APP to become available on Ios, but initial thought everything looked good. I plugged the chip in and set the speaker up in the medium enclosure, to fit where the chassis weight used to be located. Plugged it all together and it then took 23 attempts to get a sound profile to download and function, as there was no profile on the chip when initially powered up. Once everything seemed to be working well albeit the speaker sounded a little crackly and distorted, I then tried to tuck the chip into the smoke box and fit the body. I had motion and sound for a short while, but then the sound went really crackly and finally stopped working but the motion carried on moving. Off with the body again to investigate and no obvious issue, I tried to test an iPhone speaker on the chip whilst holding the bare wires against the terminals and I had sound again. So we trimmed off the plug from the box speaker and fitted the iPhone speaker to it instead, plugged it all back in and then refitted the body. The loco then happily went round our layout for a few 14ft x 8ft laps, but then the sound stopped again and the motion would keep stopping and then restarting. Upon removing the body once more, the small socket for the speaker plug had completed come off the chip board and had dropped down. Having noted that there were terminals on the other side of the board, I carefully soldered the speaker wire directly onto the board. Once the loco was rebuilt it was then tested again, with all sound working for a couple of laps and then stopped. Once the chip was re-set and the profile reloaded as it said there was a fault again, we then re tried it on the layout where it only seems to wamt to move about 3ft before stopping again with no sound Once more. Just really fed up now and reluctant to try another chip or indeed chip any more loco's if I will keep getting issues. If hornby would like me to send them the chip back for science purposes then I can do, as it seems no use to me now at all. The loco is now running again using a lais decoder I had laying around from another project.

I'm just about to have a go at doing this myself on a bush Windows based tablet, will follow the steps outlined above and go from there. Many thanks, Darryl.