I built a throttle app to suit my own purposes. In it I stole a concept from ED, namely to use the volume buttons as throttle up/down commands. That works great both in ED and my own app. I think if potential users of ED knew of that feature then they could get over the stigma of using a cell phone as a throttle.

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But in my app I extended this feature. When my loco has been commanded down to idle a further press of the down button applies the brake. In fact it applies 20% more brake with each press. If the brake has been applied then pushing the up button realeases the brake.

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I'm thinking that the brake feature could be added to ED. I don't suppose that the incremental feature is doable due to the restrictions of DCC, but just having the brake available at all without touching or even looking at the screen would be very cool.

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In my app I added a little embellishment to this feature. If my loco is slowly moving then if I do a long press on the down button the loco stops immediately. Obviously this is useful when coupling to avoid pushing the cars unprototypically. Might not be so easy to implement in ED again due to DCC issues.

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George

Edgewood, WA

George,

I’m intrigued by your idea. I try to use the volume buttons with ED whenever I can but I still look at the screen to see if the loco speed is down to zero when needed. Most times, the speed setting is at 1 or 2 when I think I’ve zeroed it out. I use momentum in my locos. One of my ED equipped cell phones has the power button below the volume buttons. For me, what would be great would be for the power button turned into a stop button (not an emergency stop button). This way, when switching cars and with practice, I could use the power button to ‘coast’ the loco into position. I’m no coder or technophile so I don’t know if this scenario is even possible. I look forward to your progress.?
Ken Koren

Rockville, IN

www.rockvillewestern.com

On Tue, Jan 7, 2025 at 07:11 AM, Ken Koren wrote:

For me, what would be great would be for the power button turned into a stop button

Unfortunately is is not possible to use the power button that way.

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Peter Akers?
[Brisbane - Queensland - Australia]?

On Tue, Jan 7, 2025 at 04:35 AM, George Hofmann wrote:

But in my app I extended this feature. When my loco has been commanded down to idle a further press of the down button applies the brake. In fact it applies 20% more brake with each press. If the brake has been applied then pushing the up button releases the brake.

As far as I am aware, the brake function is implemented differently by different decoder manufactures, and not at all by many.

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I have about two dozen locos, none of which have decoders with a brake function.? As such, I have little interest in developing a feature that a) will only work on some decoders, and b) I can't test.

To be honest, I don't completely understand what you are asking for anyway.? Probably because I have never used a decoder with a brake function.

As and aside...

I added the 'semi-realistic' throttle screen layout (in the current beta release) as a way to have a brake on any decoder, even if it doesn't have a built in brake function.? I know it is a fudge but I put it out there in the hope of getting feedback so I could improve it, but I have not received any so may remove it in subsequent releases.

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Peter Akers?
[Brisbane - Queensland - Australia]?

Brakes are usually assigned to a function, mine are all F7, so it would mean having a setting to assign as that function.

I use game pads and one of the buttons is assigned as F7 in the game pad settings, has the advantage you don't touch the phone once the loco(s) are selected.

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Mike Ruby

Yes activating a brake effect means just activating a certain function button. So the only addition to ED would be the option to activate a specified function when the down button is pressed at idle. And then to deactivate that function when the up button is pressed. Not real hard. Of course the function number assigned would have to be consistent across the user's fleet but that is the user's responsibility.

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George?

Hi George,

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I did some playing around today. I suspect I have a similar set up to your own. Locos configured with very high deceleration momentum and an independent brake function (in my case I am using an ESU V4 Select decoder).

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In the past, I have always used the screen to control throttle and to activate my brake function.

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Today I tried out the volume buttons.

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In your throttle app, does the DOWN button, once it has reached the idle position, act as a latching function or as a momentary function? That is, do you activate the brake only for as long as you hold the DOWN button? Or once the brake is activated, does it stay on (until toggled off by the UP button)?

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I can see how integrating the brake function into the operation of the UP/DOWN buttons could make them handy to use for locos set up for braking. (And I understand your point that from an ED perspective, the DOWN button could be activating any user defined function).

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(BTW for those interested I have started another thread to learn more about the Engine Driver Semi-Realistic throttle functions that Peter mentioned as I expect these new ED functions could be very interesting).

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Best

John Geddes

Vancouver, BC, Canada

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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

Hi George,

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re Onboard Loco Simulator

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Quite the project. Interesting. I agree -- wouldn't it be nice if such functionality could be built in to all decoders (assuming it didn't add a lot more cost). Perhaps it will come someday. The functionality of the ESP32-based technology is very impressive.

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In terms of your idea for ED buttons, in my limited experimentation, I came to the conclusion that your idea of using the DOWN button to invoke a given function (brake) would be handy. I might still lean to a horn-like momentary action rather than a latching action but that is hard to confirm without actually being able to try it.

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- John