Wednesday, January 27, 2010

DCC is really AC DCC (or What happened)

According to : S-91-2004-07.pdf Section C ...
The baseline method for providing the power to operate locomotives and accessories, which shall be supported by all Digital Command Stations and Digital Decoders, is by full-wave rectification of the bipolar NMRA digital signal within the Digital Decoder[7]. ...

If decoders actually did this, then DCC would actually be DC DCC, however, the problem is that footnote 7 is where they let the Devil into their Heaven.

[7] Alternate means for supplying power are acceptable, provided that Digital Command Station power units are capable of producing the baseline track signal, and Digital Decoders are capable of operation from the baseline track signal as described by this standard.

so they all can go to Hell AFAIK

... from Marcus Ammann’s DCC for Novices web page :
Pulse Width Modulation, PWM, is a cheap and easy to manufacture technique to control DC motors. Some DC power packs and most DCC decoders use this technique.
...
PWM frequency: Early “noisy” decoder - about 2 kHz. Later “quiet” decoders - above 16 kHz. Later Sound decoders - 25 kHz.
...
and they continually 'improve' in an effort to correct the initial fatal flaw of PWM on a DC motor.
...

No matter that I disagree with the AC-DCC decoder implementation, there are items of interest:

DCC code for AVR is available at Arduino Playground in the Exhibition section by Michael Blank:
a "one loco" command station and throttle . Incredible open hardware designs and open source software by Wolfgang Kufer at OpenDCC , although a lot of it is still in German... JMRI is an open source Windows-Mac-Linux Java program to run trains - interfaced with the DCC system.

and still ... i think using an RC car BEC as the speed control for a normal DC locomotive and power provider for the AVR board/servos actually provides a solution that would enable controlling the locomotive in interaction with AVR controlled loading-unloading operations. Direct control of the locomotive would be more responsive than transmitting messages to a Command station that then transmits them to the locomotive decoder. Now I need to hook up the oscilloscope to one and make sure they actually have a DC signal for the motor and not PWM as used for the servos, but servo control would be sent from the RC receiver.... or maybe a Motor controller that does not use PWM power.

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