At 9:48 PM -0600 8/2/02, millerdl wrote:
I'm not sure of the real intent of the family
names. If it is just to group the decoders to make them easier to find in
the listings, why not use the Digitrax designations as the groups. i.e. DHxxx
as a group DNxxx as another, etc.
...
From a user's point of view, my intent is to find the decoder in the list as
quickly as possible - something that can be done easily when grouped by
designation, since I know the designation. When grouped by another
classification system it is actually _harder_ to find, since I now have to
find a way to figure out where my decoder fits in the classification system.
One possible reason I could see for trying to do families is if someone has a
decoder that isn't listed, so they could try a similar decoder (and similar
numbers don't mean similar decoders, witness the DN121 and DZ121).
The "families" originally grew out of noticing that a manufacturer would have the same CVs in a lot of different models. Sometimes the models were just different in wiring harness, e.g. DH142AT vs DH142, but other times you couldn't really tell from the number that they were related. To save costs, manufacturers often put the exact same processor chip & code in different decoder models which vary only in the shape of the PC board, size and number of output drivers, etc.
So the idea of the family was that if you knew you had a "FX" decoder, you wouldn't have to worry so much _which_ decoder it was, you could just select the family as a whole. This also helped with the problem of automatic identification, which can't tell all those models apart based on the CV values they contain (because the processor is saying the same thing).
We went through several different approaches to manually selecting decoders before getting to the tree method you see now. The original single list made each one quite visible, but was _really_ long (there are over 80 individual names on the list now, and it has a ways to go).
But you raise an important point: The tree makes it hard to find a DH142 unless you know it's a Digitrax FX decoder. And we don't want to make that hard/confusing for people.
Can anybody suggest a solution that allows us to keep the tree?
Bob
--
--------------
Bob Jacobsen (Bob_Jacobsen@..., 510-486-7355, fax 510-495-2957)
At CERN until August 10, replies may be slow.
Bob Jacobsen