Protip: If your loconet is acting stupid, add more power.

[Ed Kapuscinski]

I just spent a few hours fighting with Loconet in the basement.

As soon as I turned track power on I lost control of everything. Power was still on. Turbos were whining, spitters were spitting, but throttles were unresponsive.

After some troubleshooting I decided to try adding power (through a little PS14 power supply) to one of my formerly perfectly fine BXP88s.

Voila! Everything was working perfectly now.

So lesson learned: if your Loconet suddenly starts acting up, and you DON'T have power running to everything with a power jack, add it.

 

[mmagliaro]

I'd be dying of curiosity to know what the voltage to the BXP88 was, with and without your "added power", just to see
if you were overloading whatever you were powering it with and getting a significant drop.  A PS14 says it is only a 300mA supply, so it's TINY.   I am glad you fixed your problem.  Don't get me wrong.  But it's hard to believe that 300mA would "fix things just because it is "more" power.   I'm wondering if this was caused by noise or a malfunctioning supply, that is being masked by tacking on another supply.  Any chance you can disconnect your feeds to your track and connect them, instead, to a simple isolated section of track, just to prove that turning on the track power really causes the problem?

[C855B]

Similar situation with auto-reversers. If your track power doesn't supply enough current to cross the sensing threshold for the milliseconds' worth of short circuit, they simply don't work.

[peteski]

I'm not a Digitrax expert, but LocoNet is *NOT* DCC track power.

It is the throttle bus (which also supplies power to the throttles).   So extra 300mA would be quite reasonable to provide enough power to take care of misbehaving (due to under-voltage) condition.

[squirrelhunter]

Thread drift ALERT: why not ditch the Digitax for NCE or Easy DCC?

 

[mu26aeh]

My O scale buddy had very similar issue with his CVP system.  Not enough juice.  Upped the power and cleared everything up

[mmagliaro]

Well, after reading all of your well-considered comments, and since I'm just an "interested observer" in this, I read the BXP88 installation instructions.  As it turns out, it IS connected to the booster rail A and B outputs.  It has an "optional" auxiliary power input (you can plug in a 9V DC supply).  They suggest that if you want the detector to work even when the track power is off, that you use the aux power input, so it must be using the track/booster power as its supply.  Each BXP88 needs only 150 mA.  It seems to me that tapping into the DCC track power to run these detection devices (or any other LocoNet devices) would be a bad idea.
So that's the long way of saying that now I understand Ed's problem, and why adding the little adapter helped, and why he was right when he said add power to any of your devices that don't have it.

[John]

On a larger layout, it's folly to rely on track power (Rail A / B) to power those devices alone.  I make it a practice to use PS14s or equivalent to power all the electronics on the layout, including UPs

[peteski]

Ed specifically stated "LocoNet acting stupid".
Is LocoNet the bus for throttles or other similar devices? It also supplies power to the devices on that bus?  Just to verify my understanding of how Digitrax DCC works.

[Jbub]

Thread drift ALERT: why not ditch the Digitax for NCE or Easy DCC?

 

Is someone going to get the fish lips treatment?????

[MK]

Thread drift ALERT: why not ditch the Digitax for NCE or Easy DCC?

 

Is someone going to get the fish lips treatment?????

Paging @Ed Kapuscinski   

[Ed Kapuscinski]

I'm not a Digitrax expert, but LocoNet is *NOT* DCC track power.

It is the throttle bus (which also supplies power to the throttles).   So extra 300mA would be quite reasonable to provide enough power to take care of misbehaving (due to under-voltage) condition.

Bingo.

The BXP88 sits between Loconet (the throttle/command bus) and track power.

It's... flaky.

[Ed Kapuscinski]

Thread drift ALERT: why not ditch the Digitax for NCE or Easy DCC?

 

Lisen here fishface... lol

[Ed Kapuscinski]

My O scale buddy had very similar issue with his CVP system.  Not enough juice.  Upped the power and cleared everything up

Yep. Makes sense to me.

I think we expect this stuff to be as "consumer friendly" as regular consumer electronics that sells 1000x as many units. Nope.

[Ed Kapuscinski]

It has an "optional" auxiliary power input (you can plug in a 9V DC supply).  They suggest that if you want the detector to work even when the track power is off, that you use the aux power input, so it must be using the track/booster power as its supply.  Each BXP88 needs only 150 mA.  It seems to me that tapping into the DCC track power to run these detection devices (or any other LocoNet devices) would be a bad idea.
So that's the long way of saying that now I understand Ed's problem, and why adding the little adapter helped, and why he was right when he said add power to any of your devices that don't have it.

I'm glad to have helped on the journey!

And yeah, when I read "optional" I figured that because the throttle jack next to it was powered it'd be ok. It was for something like six months. But then this past week: noooope.