Issues combining items

[Edwin Blom]

Hello,
First of all congratulations with the excellent work done to automate Lego trains. A few weeks ago I stumbled across this and am now working on a layout with 6 switches, 10 sensors, 4 signals and used by 3 trains.
I managed to get it up and running on a MacBook Pro, maybe I will write a dummy guide to help other dummies soon 🙂 because I knew nothing about microcontrollers etc and must have managed to encounter all the issues that were somewhere listed on this forum (or not).

One thing I don’t get going though is combining, for example, switches and signals on a Layout controller. I am using the ESP8266 without any extension boards

On the LayoutController I have 4 switches on D0 to D3 and two signals on D4 and D5. Switches work, signals do not. The serial monitor says that “this controller does not have such a port”.

When I set this up as two separate controllers; one for switches and one for signals, all works fine. When I change the signals to D0 and D1 (and the switches to D2-5), the signals work but the switches don’t.

I looked into the MattzoLayoutController.ino file I noticed the following;
Under the handling of the signal message it says
if (rr_port < 1 || rr_port > NUM_SIGNALPORTS) {
mcLog2(“Message disgarded, as this controller does not have such a port.”, LOG_ERR);
return;
}
With NUM_SIGNALPORTS being 2 and ports being 5 and 6 respectively, this will always throw an error to my opinion.

I guess I am using the wrong file because I see many folks managed to set it up properly with combinations of switches, signals and sensors. Can someone shine a light on this 🙂 ??

[Matthias Runte]

Hi Edwin,
can you send me your MattzoLayoutController configuration file?

Besides this, keep up the good work with your layout!

Cheers,
Mattze

[Matthias Runte]

Thanks for sending me your configuration. The problem here is, that you need to start counting at 1 for each different component type in Rocrail. Imagine you have 1 switch, 2 signal LEDs and 2 sensors. The components may be connected to pin D0, D1/D2 and D3/D4 respectively, but this does not play a role for the correct numbering of the Rocrail ports.

The numbering for the Rocrail ports should look like this:
Switch (pin D0): Port 1
Signal 1 (pin D1): Port 1
Signal 2 (pin D2): Port 2
Sensor 1 (pin D3): Port 1
Sensor 2 (pin D4): Port 2

As you can see, the pin allocation on the microcontroller does not play a role for the numbering of the Rocrail ports.

A small lookout: with firmware 0.5, configuration is going to get somewhat easier (I hope).

[Autor]

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