Thanks for the help, Randy. I must admit that I was initially enamoured by the prospect of controlling 20 turnouts with one decoder, and never actually broke down the numbers! That's why I love this forum - it truly is the place for sober second thought.
Looks like the 'tortoise adapter' is little more than a relay. I have no idea why you would need those capacitors. The only other component I can see you'd need is a protection diode across the relay coil to protect the board's output.
An interesting product, but a bit pricey. On one hand I can see why they left out the ability to directly control a Tortoise - it avoids the possibility of programmign it the wrong way and ruining twin-coil switch machines. But there are other accessory decoders that do allow you to set either twin coil or tortoise just by programming it, not adding an extra gadget. They don;t show that adapter on their site, so who knows what the cost is. It's already $10/output without the adapter - consider instead the NCE Switch-It, about $20 street and it controls 2 Tortoises AND has pushbutton inputs as well. Or the NCE Switch-8 which controls 8 Tortoises for about $6 each.
--Randy
Modeling the Reading Railroad in the 1950's
Visit my web site at www.readingeastpenn.com for construction updates, DCC Info, and more.
I was wondering in anyone has experience with the DCC Devices Universal Decoder? I was looking into it on their website, and everything seemed straight forward, until I noticed in a PDF that describes how to use the decoder with Tortoise switch machines that you need an adapter to run the machines? Does anyone know anything about this? Their website doesn't mention the tortoise adapter anywhere else, and I haven't been able to actually find this adapter for sale anywhere. Any help/info would me excellent!
Thanks