NCE Mini-Panel Instruction - page 8
Other commands
There are 6 groups of ‘other’ commands executed by the Mini Panel. These
commands do not result in a DCC command being sent but control the flow of the
commands from the Mini Panel.
? Delays - Two different delay commands can be used. These commands will cause
the Mini Panel to delay execution of the next command in increments of ¼ second
(up to 64 seconds total delay) or increments of 4 seconds (up to 1020 seconds
total delay). A delay of 0 will cause the next command to be executed immediately.
Use of this command causes all operation of the Mini Panel to stop while the
command is in progress.
? Wait - There are two Wait commands, one command waits for a indicated input to
be grounded, the other waits for the indicated input to become ungrounded (open).
Use of this command causes all operation of the Mini Panel to stop while the
command is in progress.
? Link - Use of this command will transfer operation to the string of four commands
associated with another input.
? Skip -There are two commands that can be used to make a decision based on the
status of an input. These commands check the status of a user indicated input
and either execute the next command in the string or skip over that command and
execute the following command. One skip command skips if the indicated input is
grounded the other skips if the input is ungrounded (open). These are very
powerful commands allowing the Mini Panel to execute different commands based
on the state of an input at the time the skip command is executed.
? Nop - The No-Operation command. This command can be used as a place holder
for future commands. When the Mini panel encounters this command in the
command string it will be ignored and the next command will be executed.
? CV Program - Allows programming of locomotive CVs in Ops mode. OPs mode
programming requires 3 steps:
set loco address (long or short)
set CV number
set CV data
When the data command is executed an Ops programming command will be
issued out over the cab bus to the track.
Technical stuff:
Linking command strings
Inputs cannot normally be “decoupled” from their command string. If you link to the
command string of an input that is connected to something that may activate that input,
the commands for that input will be executed when the input is grounded. In some
circumstances this may be desirable allowing portions of larger, longer command
strings to be used. Normally you will want to leave linked inputs electrically
unconnected.
Disabling inputs
Memory location 4 can be programmed with the input number above which electrical
status of those inputs will be ignored. Grounding one of those inputs will not result in
execution of its command string. The input will still be sampled by any 0xc6
commands that look at input status.
Continuous Memory
You can write fairly long automation sequences by constructing strings of 3 commands
followed by a link to another string. This is inefficient in that only three out of four
command locations in memory actually control anything.
Memory location 3 can be programmed with an input number above which memory will
be considered continuous. This means above that input number commands will
continue to flow across each four command boundary and be executed until a
terminating command of 0x00,0x00 is encountered.
Last revised: 22 July 2008 Page 8