John:
To make a long story short, in my app pushing the volume down button at idle applies 20% more brake for each push until reaching 100%. It latches. Pushing the up button when the brake is applied releases the brake. I believe this is a reasonable model of the prototype. Using the volume buttons for the throttle works very well for me. I don't have to look at the screen let alone touch it. I always use ED when operating at our museum club layout. So much better than using the clumsy DT602. We are not allowed(!) to incorporate momentum in any of our locos there. But if the speed step in ED is set to a high value then using the throttle buttons automatically simulate momentum. That is, pushing the up button and holding it will ramp up the speed but only somewhat slowly. You can always use the slider or the stop button to stop immediately.
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Seems to me this concept would not be difficult to add to ED except for the incremental part. Just activate a configured function on the down press, deactivate it on the up press.
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To make a short story long, consider that my app is part of a system that I developed for my own use called the Onboard Loco Simulator. It places a bit of hardware (ESP32 based) in the loco between a power source (track or battery) and the existing DCC sound decoder. It acts as a DCC command station, an MQTT client for commands and telemetry and a web server for configuration. It also acts as a simulator (like a really lame version of Flight Simulator) constantly computing acceleration as the sum of the forces acting on the loco divided by the sum of the mass of the train. Thus acceleration and deceleration curves are non-linear as they are in real life. There are a lot of features in this system that make it very prototypical feeling and fun to use. The most important is that the user controls power, not speed. Real engineers do not directly control the speed of their train by twisting a knob. The app I built communicates with the loco using MQTT which is a tried and true industry standard protocol. Locos communicate with each other for consisting using the same protocol. This system overcomes many of the shortcomings of using straight DCC. As an example, being bidirectional it can feed back data to the app like true scale speed and distance traveled. It requires no external DCC system to operate although it can use the DCC track voltage for power. I'm only using existing DCC decoders because I don't want to reinvent that wheel. Also I'm not smart enough. The ideal solution would be to have one piece of hardware, incorporating OLS and the existing superb sound and motor control capability of modern DCC decoders. Having that, we could say good bye and good riddance to DCC.
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George
Edgewood, WA
George Hofmann