This was supposed to be a nice easy post on a Friday evening followed by a beer or ten. However as with most things electronic its not gone quite to plan.

So what are we attempting to do? well in order to have the layout run from anywhere in the world it needs to talk to the computer and the plan is to do that using JMRI and a USB interface. Its usually simple and I have done this on my other layout before with no issue. Not today it would seem but anyway lets talk about the process.

So this is what you need to interface an NCE powerCab to your PC. Its a standard NCE Cab bus cable, a NCE USB Interface and a USB A>B cable like you use for hooking up a printer.

To set up power up the Powercab and then plug the NCE USB Interface into the spare Cab socket and you should be able to detect the device when you plug it into your PC.

When you open JMRI you will be asked to set up connections if not go to Edit>Preferences and you’ll see connections at the top

Select NCE as the Manufacturer and NCE USB as the system connection. Its really important you select the correct COM port, if you don’t know which one to use then go to Device Manager on your PC (if windows) and find the ‘CP210x USB to UART Bridge’ thats the NCE USB device look for the com port and make sure this matches in JMRI. Save your settings and exit.

When you return to the Decoder Pro screen you should then see the two green indications at the bottom of the window. If like mine did for the best part of an hour these go red and are not connected after a few seconds but are green to start with go to JMRI downloads and update the version on your PC. Then un plug and start everything again. If its red and never green check you have selected the correct COM port.

Then to test you have control of the layout go to Actions>New Throttle you’ll get this window

Select a loco on your roster thats on the layout by entering the address in the Address Panel and click on set. This will aquire the locomotive. Then see if you can use any of the functions if a sound loco Horn is always a good one to test. If thats all working then you are set up and ready to go. You can either go to the next stage and use Wifi throttles or even allow remote ops or program your locomotives..

We’ll cover the JMRI Web Server for WIFI throttles and also Remote Ops in a future blog post.

Now where is that Beer!!