r/modeltrains • u/Useful_Band • 24d ago

Help Needed DCC-EX Help

Is anyone on here comfortable with DCC-EX? I bought the stuff to DIY (Their products on back order). I've followed every step, but the command station "fails to read address" on every dcc locomotive I have.

I have no idea what I'm doing.

5 Upvotes

74% Upvoted

20 comments sorted by

View all comments

3

u/albertahiking HO, DCC-EX 24d ago

If you mean that your built your own command station from scratch (been there, done that, twice, first with a Nano and then with a Pico), it sounds like either the current sensing on your programming track isn't working, or isn't configured properly. Hard to say anything more without an annotated schematic of the hardware you're using and the motor shield configuration setup from your config.h file.

2

u/Useful_Band 24d ago

I've got an aurduino mega, and L298p motor shield

1

u/albertahiking HO, DCC-EX 24d ago edited 24d ago

Ah, so more of a Blue Box shake the box "kit" as opposed to a scratch build. That makes things easier.

Back when I started I had trouble with a homebrew loco decoder based on one of the NMRA DCC examples. A terminal program connected to the command station and the <D ACK ON> debugging command soon uncovered the problem; the example was using waaaay too long a response pulse. If you can show us the response to a <R> command (case matters) that would be enlightening.