DIY DCC with PC

[Anonymous]

I want to put together a DCC system using a PC as command station, I'd like to do all programming from the PC in a windows interface, no text editors. I'm looking for a DIY project, are there any articles or books on this?

[tstage]

Pat,

I'm still looking into DCC myself so I don't have a lot of input to give you. Have you looked at either Kaumbach Publishing's "DCC Made Easy" or Digitrax's "Big Book of DCC"?

My two mites worth...

Tom

[SteelMonsters]

I don't think there is a publication about doing that. Are you planning on building your own boosters too? You might want to use NMRA standards as a starting point in your project.

http://www.nmra.org/standards/consist.html#standards-DCC

[cacole]

It has been done. The Cochise & Western Model Railroad Club is using an Atari 8-bit home computer for a home-made DCC system that was designed, programmed, and built by a digital electronics engineer in England. You will need a hardware interface that can take the DCC command signals and superimpose them onto your track power. This is the booster.

[rrinker]

There is a booster circuit diagram on Rob Paisley's site at http://home.cogeco.ca/~rpaisley4/CircuitIndex.html

[Anonymous]

Also check out DecoderPro at http://jmri.sourceforge.net/ -- it's a freeware Java-based application that lets you program decoders and run layouts. Pretty sophisticated, and I couldn't image doing DCC without it these days. They have links on the website to hardware interface vendors also, some of whom provide circuit diagrams for the interface so you could build one yourself.