I’m slowly converting all of my locomotives to work with my Bluetooth Device and my Cheap Smart Phone. So next on the list was my Aristo Dash9/QSI. I had it working with my Xbee thing from long ago so I just replaced the one controller board and it’s happy. It still needs more testing on the app side and tweaking on the decoder side but it seems pretty solid. I like the QSI, it has some protocol quirks but good sounds and I like the right/left stereo thing.
Hi Martin -
The test units of your MegaDCC board and DCC Amp arrived on schedule several weeks ago. I’ve been tied up with some changes to the electronics of a new locomotive so I haven’t had any time to play with it. I did read up on it and downloaded GenBlue, TCSWOW and economi apps from your website and installed them on my Fire 10 for testing. In practice, the 10 will be too big, but for bench testing it should be fine. Can you explain, here, or on your website the differences between the apps?
I hope to at least get a test-bed loco wired up over Christmas break. I need to buy some servo cables since the last RailBoss I picked up used didn’t come with any. Also considering picking up a cheap DCC controller for sound and maybe a simple ESC and try a whole new way of doing things…
Sure Jon. The DCC apps are very similar, I’ve just put some of the more common functions- lights, direction, bell, horn, crossing, brakes etc, right on the front screen as buttons. These vary slightly from decoder to decoder so I’ve got two specific apps, an Economi version and a TCS wow version for those. There is also the Generic DCC App which functions pretty much like a standard hand held DCC controller for any decoder. It supports the 128 step throttle, the functions 0-28 and CV programming.
Then there is what I call an ‘RC’ only app version. It just controls the servos and digital outputs if you want to use a servo or ESC to drive things. However, the throttle servo output and the DCC throttle commands are linked at the firmware level so you always get DCC throttle commands that match servo 0 output (I call this the ‘hybrid’ version) if you want to use that.
Also, to some extent the apps are all beta as well- I’m still trying out a few ideas of what works best so I’m adding to them or upgrading and fixing any little bugs I find. I have six up there now, I may thin that out as I go on or add more. Not quite sure yet. I will put more details on the web site and on the play store. Thanks for the feedback! Also, no hurry on the testing, take your time and feel free to email me directly at [email protected] with any questions.