Hi team! I just wanted to share some of my experiences with the BLI Paragon 4 (in a EMD GP30 - Model 7581). In summary, if you look at it wrong you break it, LoL. I am tickling it in two ways: 1) NCE PowerCab 2) DCC-EX (no wifi) over USB serial communications on OSX 14.1.1 using JMRI and DecoderPro. Elegoo Mega and a DCC-EX EX-Motor Shield 8874. Is this just the way it is? What I originally wanted to do was configure it so that I could control everything. Mars light, cab light, ditch lights (front and rear), head lights (front and rear), number boards, and all 4 million sounds individually, for example. Nothing automatic. I'm weird like that. Consider this: It looks interesting, doesn't it? Here's what I can see in DecoderPro, however: Where is CV9? Nobody knows, And nobody is telling, LoL. Also, notice how I cannot write to CV8? Hmmm. With the NCE Powercab I can spray and pray into these CV values but then it IMMEDIATELY hoses the loco. It can be seen by DecoderPro and I can ping it but when I put it on the main track it doesn't respond to any commands. Very odd. Hardware reset and then it is normal again. If anybody is wondering why newbies like me get frustrated I hope this can help you understand. These screen shots were taken after a hardware reset of the decoder so this loco is essentially factory fresh. Just make it make sense. So far, I have had better luck playing with a LokSound 5 DCC decoder but I think this may just be dumb luck. Again, I am admittedly a total newb and I'm hoping I am just violating some rule that "everybody knows" but isn't actually written down anywhere. I covered a lot of ground here but really I just need to know what I am doing wrong (in my thinking or assumptions). Thank you all in advance, Kent
CV8 is the manufacturers ID number. It was originally designated as read-only, but has become a common reset CV. You still typically wouldn't write to it from this screen because it would reset all of the other CVs and they would no longer match what the screen has, hence the reason for it being read-only here. You can still write to it from JMRI using the single CV programmer (more on that in a moment). There appears to be an error in the configuration file for the BLI and so JMRI thinks CV9 is not used by that decoder, so you'll have to use the single CV programmer to program it. From the main DecoderPro screen, select Actions and Single CV Programmer. From there you can read and write any single CV, whether JMRI recognizes it as used by the decoder or not.
Robert, Thank you very much! This his is very helpful information. I confirmed that I can use Single CV programmer. It works on this loco. Unfortunately it is the equivalent of using the NCE PowerCab. It cripples the locomotive. At least I have apples to apples and now I have repeatable results. This will probably help we with BLI support. I don't know, of course, but this feels for all the world like a half baked implementation. Cheers! Kent
One more thing. This was user error in the end. I had disassembled the loco at one point and plugged the PCB wires for the Cab and Rotary Beacon back into the wrong socket. My bad. Fixed now and everything is working perfectly. Cheers! Kent
