On 1/24/2025 9:24 PM, Jay Beckham wrote:

Is Dick still operating at RR-CirKits?

Yes. I've seen him post to this group on a LCC thread and on a signaling thread in the past week.

? Basically are the 2009 PanelPro Clinics still applicable to the recent version of JMRI?

Generally, yes. Specifically? Probably not. JMRI has changed in various ways since 2000, so details have likely changed! I would think that JMRI's CMRI "features" haven't changed much, but Dick probably hasn't focused on CMRI in general anyways. JMRI's Signaling, in general, probably has had a few new features since 2000, though. Newer "support" materials are likely "better".

Or should I go to some of the many videos on You Tube?

Videos tend to be more-recent than Dick's presentations.

But videos have the same problems as web pages - JMRI can have changes since JMRI version that was used when the video was produced, just like ".pdf"s... No matter how the material is presented, they may or may not tell which JMRI version was used, they may or may not discuss why certain JMRI features were used or not used, and they may or may not present a "good" way to do things in JMRI.

(For my time and effort, I will _always_ go to a printed material, for many of the reasons just mentioned. If nothing else, I can pull down a PDF that I have never seen, and use the "Search" feature of a PDF reader FAR more accurately than I can pay attention to both video and audio for the duration of a typical video! Et voila! An answer to my question, or pull another download and do some PDF searching, all in the time that the video is still talking about things I have no interest in... But, "Your Mileage May Vary"...)

And, for those of you who expect to be at the Amhurst Railway Society's huge annual train show in Springfield, MA this weekend, Dick is at the RR-Circuit booth today and tomorrow, and he will give a couple of LCC clinics, too...

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Jay,

The basics are still true, but the subjects change as the world of electronics moves along. Most modern electronics is peer-peer, including the new NMRA LCC standards, so my later clinics concentrate on those principles. The newest videos also cover the new LCC standards, and are even newer than all except the latest posted clinics.

Dick :)

On 1/25/2025 11:17 AM, Dave Sand wrote:

Jay,
I recommend that you look at the CTC tool within JMRI. ?The help page is at <>

That's JMRI's "new"er CTC solution, as opposed to several older JMRI pieces that can be used as part of a CTC solution with _lots_ of extra "work".

It can produce something "like" a CTC solution.

But be aware that if you want something "prototypical", you may need a different solution than that newer JMRI CTC tool can provide. That one does not seem to model a "code line", and falls short of handling things beyond OS and Signal and Switch indications and controls. In many ways, it is more like a "direct-wired" CTC solution, rather than a "time-coded" CTC solution.

If you have a typical CMRI "QB" code implementation a-la Chubb's documentation, then you may have features that the JMRI "new" CTC _cannot_ do , probably including a "time-coded" CTC solution.

This would not be a significant problem, except that _all of JMRI's CTC logic_ implemented in the "new" CTC solution is _hidden_ from the user. So when you want to get things to work differently, you can try to "tweak" the configuration information. Maybe you can get it to work the way you want. Maybe not. But you cannot change the "new" CTC code without JAVA experience, something that is awkward for most. And that typically means that you will spend time working with a JMRI developer to get new features added.

(Signaling is HARD. Anyone who tells you otherwise is full of wishful thinking, or doing something wrong, or doing something so simple that it is nothing like time-coded "CTC"!)

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Jay,

I have never used CMRI for anything, so I am not a good judge of how much any of our clinics would be applicable to your hardware. I'm guessing that JMRI levels the field a lot between different hardware systems, but any of my recent clinics would be aimed at using LCC hardware, not so much at using JMRI itself, so probably not be of much use to you. :(

The advantage of JMRI over VB is that it has lots of rules for signaling on different railroads built in, so it is much easier than figuring out the rules on your own. Also it can do operations in higher level concepts like aspects and masts.

Dick :)

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Please don't change the subject line, it creates a new topic.
I'm going to manually merge your last post into the original topic.

--
Peter Ulvestad
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