the Cab Bus Communications Protocol describes the messages and timing. But it's a bit unclear how to interpret the character strings used to update the LCD.
stripping the 8th bit matches ASCII characters. 0xFA suggests an end-of-string (i.e. NULL). But it looks like other byte sequences suggest what the cab should display in a meaningful way (e.g loco number and speed) .
does anyone have any knowledge about how to translate the LCD strings from the command station?
thanks
greg - Philadelphia & Reading / Reading
Looks like Page 4 gives the bit patterns that get sent for a loco address and for a speed. Requires a little binary calculation to reassemble the parts into a plain decimal number to display but nothing too fancy. I would expect that for loco information you would get those opcodes rather than the ones at th ebeginning of the section which say they display the next 8 bytes on line 1 or line 2 of the display - those are what it sends to display menu selections and so forth.
--Randy
Modeling the Reading Railroad in the 1950's
Visit my web site at www.readingeastpenn.com for construction updates, DCC Info, and more.
Randy
your referencing the 0XDB loco info cmd which reports the direction, speed and loco number. Not sure how this is used.
the LCD update cmds: 0xC0-C7 provide the information on the LCD. Contrary to what I suggested initially, I see now the that coding is similar to ASCII and also indicates the direction, speed and loco number.
I'm fiddling with the conversion to ASCII. Might be as simple as inverting the 6th and 7th bits.