Today, in the new episode of my tutorial about how to control a digital model railway with Arduino, let’s learn together how to use the Loconet Control Panel with DCC++ Command Station.
If your command station supports the Loconet bus, the turnout commands sent by the control panel are received directly by the command station, which then generates the corresponding DCC packets for the accessory decoder which controls the turnout.
If, on the other hand, you want to use Loconet devices with a non-Loconet command station, you have to build a stand-alone Loconet network, connected to your computer using a Loconet interface such as the Locobuffer seen in a previous tutorial. In this case you are forced to configure two different connections in the software you’re using to control your layout:
The problem is that – when adding a new turnout, you have to specify the connection the turnout is connected to and the software assumes that commands to move the turnout also come from the same connection.
It’s therefore necessary to somehow create a mapping between commands addressed to Loconet turnouts and turnouts connected to DCC++.
This can be achieved both in JMRI and in Rocrail:
- using my custom script for JMRI
- using the Command Mapping functionality of Rocrail
In the following videotutorial I explain in details both methods… enjoy!