TC-64 Tower Controller

Photo courtsey of Dick Bronson at R-R CirKits.

A BOD-8 will be place in slot 1, with an address of TC-64 base + 0.

Photo courtsey of Dick Bronson at R-R CirKits.

A 10 wire cable will be placed in slot 2, with an address of TC-64 base + 8.

A second 10 wire cable will be placed in slot 3, with an address of TC-64 base + 16.

A SMD-8 will be placed in slot 4, with an address of TC-64 base + 24.

Photo courtsey of Dick Bronson at R-R CirKits.

A second BOD-8 will be placed in slot 5 if needed or left blank.

Photo courtsy of Dick Bronson at R-R CirKits.

A 4ASD-4 will be placed in slot 8 if signals are present in the plant, with an address of TC-64 address + 56.

Photo courtsey of Dick Bronson at R-R CirKits.

With DecoderPro the following will be set:

BASIC:

4 digit addressing mode and TC-64 number

                                      TOWER CONTROLLER:

UPDATING FIRMWARE

The TC-64 upgrade process is done over the LocoNet while they are in place on the layout. You just need to press the programming button 10+ seconds until the yellow light comes on steadily on each unit. There is no feedback process during the update, so they can all be done at one time. Be very sure that you have the data for each one saved in a roster in case something goes wrong, goes wrong, goes wrong, goes wrong, goes wrong, goes wrong. <g> The file I sent you is supposed to maintain all the unit's settings intact during the upgrade process, but you know how that goes sometimes.

There is currently no info available on the new features other than the added option on the DecoderPro 'Tower Controller' tab. It is the new option called 'Output Interrogate'. Apparently JMRI already knew about how to interpret the data, because it just seems to work. It is actually a part of the 'Switch Feedback' message type which we had implemented incorrectly. There was very little info on how that was supposed to work in the LocoNet specifications and we had done it incorrectly. Once we did it correctly we realized that we could also use it during the initial JMRI startup to get the switch info back into JMRI, so we added in the option.

Things operate best when GPON Interrogate is set to 'No', and both 'Input Interrogate' and 'Output Interrogate' are set to 'Enable'. This used to be called 'Special Interrogate' but it only worked correctly for inputs. Once we fixed it so the outputs also worked we decided to add an option switch for each. We have also disabled any responses from outputs that are in SE8c mode because those would be meaningless to JMRI.