I’ve decided not to use DCC any more…….. That is for controlling anything other than trains. I’m fed up with DCC and point operation, and I can’t think of a single use case as to why it’s necessary. Last weekend I had a very bored 5 year old in the railway room while grandpa tried to figure out why my Lenz controller, JMRI and Megapoints wouldn’t communicate after a short circuit. It happened no once but three times, each time only solved by a complete restart of the entire control system. From now on all accessories will be operated outside of DCC, and extra short circuit protection is going to be added for extra reliability. The big development this week is that I (or rather ChatGPT) figured out how to interface Megapoints to JMRI directly and dispense with sending instructions via the DCC bus. I tested it out this morning and it works perfectly. Why does this help? If a point is set incorrectly and a train hits a frog with the wrong polarity then at least the points will still operate and allow the route to be reset before track power is switched back on again

Posted by Kevin Appleby at 2025-08-09 22:26:53 UTC