Hello AllI'm preparing to install my first SE8C at the club. Looking at the manual I see that the board can be used for powering Slow Motion Switch Machines and Controlling Signals.My question is, does the SEC8C drive 8 Torti's OR 64 signal LED's?The other option is does the SEC8C drive 8 torti's AND 64 signal LED's?
Springfield PA
It's AND. The whole idea behind the board is that it can control 8 total security elements: turnout motor, block detector to interlock it, and the 4 signal heads required to fully signal it. Plus a local control pushbutton for each turnout motor.
--Randy
Modeling the Reading Railroad in the 1950's
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Thanks
I'm surprised by the amount of switch addresses it eats up. Will take some planning since there will be several.
Can;t be helped, really - with 32 signal heads at 2 addresses each, plus the 8 turnouts and 8 sensors - well, yeah, it adds up pretty quickly. Since there's no logic on the SE8C, each signal head can be individually addressed. So you can set up plants for sidings, crossings, or just make intermediate signals. There are over 2500 addresses so you cna have as many as 36 SE8C's - and STILL not use every possible accessory decoder address. If you have more signals than that..well, you'll probably need multiple Loconets.
The potential issue is that we have a large layout and there are numerous existing DS54's and 64's using addresses. The 64's use feedback from the turnouts they control. The basic result is that even though the SE8C's may not be using thier Torti outputs, the inputs will being used for block detection. The addresses are hard coded by ID so there will be a potential that the number of switch addresses may be reduced and made unusable by the original equipment because of the SE8C's hard coded numbers.
By the way. Can more than one loconet exist using panel pro?
HamltnblueBy the way. Can more than one loconet exist using panel pro?
Yes. From the release notes for the 2.10 production version:
JMRI can now provide two LocoNet connections at the same time. You can configure two in the preferences, and the second one will have system names that start with "L2" instead of "L", e.g. "L2T1", "L2S1", etc. Note that you'll still get a warning about "duplicate connections" when saving the preferences, but you can ignore this. We'll make this part of the code smarter eventually.
If you connect nothing to the Tortoise output on an SE8C and there happens to be a DS64 using that same address - nothign will happen. Notice the switch address on the SE8C, indeed controlled by board ID, are far lower than the addresses that board ID gives for the signals. There should be plenty of addresses - if you use 12 SE8C's, that's 384 signal heads, you have open switch addresses from 97-256 and from 1025-2048 for the DS64's and other bits.
Just takes a little planning.
We looked into it tonight. There are 31 DS 54 adn 64's currently on the layout starting at address 1. I noticed that the DS64's can address up to 256. We'll need a dozen or more signal controllers. We'll basically have to re-address the DS 54's and 64's to higher numbers to give us enough room and move the conflicting switch and input addresses. That includes the panel pro software.
31 DS's starting at 1 uses 1-125. Set the first SE8C to board ID 17, the switch addresses are 129-136. That leaves room for 20 SE8C's.