Manual – Red Kite DCC

3rd October 20173rd October 2017

Managing Locos

To control locomotives on the layout they need to be added to the system, this is performed in the engine shed section.

To add a locomotive you should go to the engine shed page and click the “Add Loco” button, on clicking this button two fields will be displayed “Loco Number” and “Loco Name”. The “Loco Number” is required the “Loco Name” is optional once filled in click the save button. The loco will be added to the roster.

Once the new loco has been added to the roster it can be linked with a decoder by clicking the “configure” button and select the decoder and then click the “assign” button.

Assigning the decoder by selecting from the dropdown.

The locomotive can now be controlled using the “Drive” button on the left of the locomotive.

The locomotives name and number can be modified by clicking the “edit” button this shows the same section as used to add a new locomotive, update the values and click save to update.

15th August 20173rd October 2017

Settings

System Setup

Selecting the menu option brings up the settings page. This page is used for configuring the system.

There are two system settings currently DCC System and Serial Port.

Screenshot of the system settings — System Settings

The DCC System is a drop down list of the DCC systems that are supported by this application (At time of writing this is currently only the NCE System and a Demo System.) The default for this setting is a Demo System that is used for mimicking a real DCC System for demo purposes.

The Serial Port is used for setting the serial port that the application will use to communicate with the DCC System. The default for this is /dev/ttyUSB0 for a windows installation this should be changed to COM1 etc depending on which port the DCC System is connected too.

Along with the system settings build information can also be found on this page. This shows various bits of information about when the application currently running was built.

Screenshot of build information — Build Information

3rd July 201715th August 2017

Installation

System Requirements

DCC Web Application will run on the following systems Windows and Linux (Will also probably run on Macs too but this has not been confirmed.)

The current version requires Java 1.8 installed and the RXTX (Currently tested with 2.2pre2 version) libraries.

For the latest version of java from Java.com

Installing RXTX using instructions from RXTX Web Site

Linux Installation

The RxTx libraries should be installed this can be done simply on debian systems using the following command:

sudo apt-get install librxtx-java

Download the tar.gz file from here.

Untarring the tar.gz file will create the directory dccweb directory.

Within the new dccweb directory is a jar file this can be executed by using the following.

./dcc-webapp-VERSION.jar

java -jar dcc-webapp-VERSION.jar

Once started the application will create a default empty database and initialize log file directory.

The jar can also be set to run as a service by using the following command

sudo ln -s INSTALL_DIR/dcc-web/dcc-webapp-VERSION.jar /etc/init.d/dccweb

Windows Installation

Download the zip file from here.

Unzipping this file will create a dccweb directory.

Within the dccweb directory is the dcc-webapp-VERSION.jar file this can be executed by double clicking or by running using a command line.

java -jar dcc-webapp-VERSION.jar

On running the application will initialize itself by create a database and log directory.

Configuration

The dcc web application can be configured by editing the configuration config/application.properties

The http port used can be configured by editing server.port the default is port 8080.

The other settings control the database settings and should be left at the default settings.

The web application can be connected to using any browser using the ip address of the machine the service is running on and the port number configured in server.port.

For example to connect to the service running on the local machine can be connected to using the following url http://127.0.0.1:8080

19th June 20173rd October 2017

Reading Decoders

In order to get decoders loaded into the application there CV values need to be read. In order to do this navigate to the “Loco Decoders” page and click the “Read Values” button at the top of the right hand column.

Once the “Read Values” button is clicked the controller will be put into Program Mode and basic CV values are read from the decoder from the track that is in Program Mode. Once all the basic CV values are read the track will be taken out of Program Mode and decoder information will be displayed on the screen.

The decoder will also be added to the list of decoders on the left hand side of the page.

Once loaded the decoder can be linked to a locomotive.