Page 27 - NMRA Roundhouse September-October 2018

To add a new loco click on the ‘New Loco’ button, you’ll then be asked to select your decoder from the list, or to get DecoderPro to ‘read’ the decoder automatically.
save it to the decoder. With Lenz (the system I have on my layout) it takes at least 12 key presses on the hand- held controller to achieve the same result. The same method in Decoder Pro is used to make complex chang- es. And we will look at that next.
and 4, so that F3 operates the Ditch lights and F4 operates the Dim- ming. For Function 3 click in the box to select Dim and deselect Ditch, and repeat this process for Function 4. DecoderPro changes the background of the changes made to yellow, so
you can see which operations have change to be made.
Now click ‘Write changes on sheet’ and wait until everything stops flashing on the screen. The loco may move too
on the program- ming track whilst this is happening (It does at least show things are happening!). If any of the col-
umns stay Red then the program- ming has been unsuccessful. Howev- er, in our example everything worked fine and the background returned to clear.
As you can see the changes have been made with 5 clicks of the mouse and none of the stress of a proprietary DCC system! Placing the loco on the layout and selecting F3 now switches the Ditch lights on and F4 Dims the headlights.
Ian Watton
. . . In the next part of this series we’ll look at adding another loco to DecoderPro’s roster and program- ming a sound loco.
In this example DecoderPro has successfully read the loco’s decoder and returned the decoder’s manu- facturer, type of decoder and loco’s address as currently programmed in the decoder. In this case the address is 716. We can change the Roster ID to something meaningful (I usually change it to the loco’s description and running number). It is possible to change the loco’s address on this screen so let’s do it! Enter a new number in “Active Address” then click on ‘Write’.
Click on ‘Open Comprehensive Pro- grammer’, one of the tabs available (shown above) is the Function Map. This gives details of what function
is attributed to which output wire or operation. What is a time consum- ing process with Lenz, becomes
a doddle with JMRI. Everything is displayed on screen. The first step we need to do is ‘Read Full Sheet’ to see what is already programmed in the decoder. Having done this, the default positions on the sheet change from a yellow background to clear background and the ticks may move around. I have multiple output wires/ operations configured to function 1,
2 and 6 (This loco has working ditch lights that flash for grade crossing simulation and there are dimming capabilities for all lights).
In the example below I want to change the operation of functions 3
When you write changes to the de- coder all the boxes that can be writ- ten briefly turn red then flash yellow as the changes are accepted. If I put the loco on my layout now I would be able to run it as #455. As you can see we only needed 4 mouse clicks to change the running number and
October 2018 - ROUNDHOUSE 27