Dinamousers | UCCI and Train Controller

UCCI and Train Controller

Posted by Edmunds on 2010-02-01 23:07

Hi all,

I am looking for the right car system solution. I was thinking DC Car, but now when I have learned about Google Translate :-) and can understand most of VPEB site in Dutch, I am thinking I should give MCC/UCCI at least a test run for it's lack of infrared hassle.

The concern at this point is that as far as my Dutch goes (which is nowhere :-D ), UCCI can only be operated by Dinamo, Rocrail and some other Dutch or something software.

I am running the rest of my layout with Train Controller from Freiwald and there are no plans to change that. The advantage of the DC Car system is I could run it with any DCC compatible system including Train Controller. This means I do not need to run another system and I can run cars from the same computer and even the same switchboard window.

Anyone knows if it would be possible to control UCCI from Train Controller?

Thank you and BR,

/Edmunds, Latvia

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Posted by Hans Nouwens on 2010-02-01 23:27 Netherlands

Hello Edmunds,

the VPEB website has some pages in English too. The MCC pages are all translated. Look at the right top of the page, there you can see a British flag if an English page is available.

Concerning the DCC generated by any controler, including Train Controler. No, you cannot use them to control the MCC cars. MCC has it's own protocol. This has two reasons: The first is that the cars receive their commands with a quite sensitive induction coil. Any similar DCC commands from a near by train track will interfere horribly with the car commands. Secondly, the DCC protocol has some issues concerning timing when you have more than a handfull of trains running at the same time. The MCC protocol fixes this and guarantees a constant stream of command packages to the cars.

With kind regards,
Hans Nouwens.

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Posted by Leon van Perlo on 2010-02-02 01:02 Netherlands

Hi Edmunds,

Apart from thefact that MCC uses an optimized protocol, there's another reason why using a general train-control program is a less optimal solution: Cars behave totally different than trains. If you want a realistic operation you'll need some adaptations anyway.

As Hans wrote we have choosen a different protocol than DCC. To be honest, I'm not that afraid that DCC signals would interfere, but since we designed this system for the largest commercial layout in The Netherlands http://www.railzminiworld.com I wanted to avoid all possible risk that a car would stop on a railway crossing because it happened to receive some DCC command that told it to do so. The main reason is that DCC is i.m.h.o. far too inefficient when you need to distribute commands to something like 60 cars running on the same road. Note that when running cars, events appear to happen up to 10 times faster than with trains, so you really need some performance when you want real-time control.

Kind regards,
Leon

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Posted by Edmunds on 2010-02-02 08:39

Hello,

Thank you for your detailed answers. Ok, ok - you convinced me. DCC is the wrong language. This probably means two computers to run my 4x8 HO scale (being extended) layout http://www.edmundsworld.net. Americans are making fun of me in the forums for using one computer to run it and what now? Heh ... :-D

Let me finish putting together a test project here and expect an order of some basic set in the near future.

Thank you!

/Edmunds, Latvia

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Posted by Edmunds on 2010-02-03 15:56

hmm.

Yet another question. How do you do distance control? I mean faster cars not running into the slower or stopped cars in front?

/Edmunds, Latvia

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Posted by Hans Nouwens on 2010-02-03 21:43 Netherlands

Edmunds,
the cars are kept in their own virtual block, just as trains. Because the blocks are very short (like 30 cm) it looks like they are keeping distance. In this case it works very much like DCC trains.

Hans Nouwens.

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UCCI and Train Controller

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