Recently over on a certain other board we where helping a member with an Atlas locomotive that was bought second hand, and evidently the inside had been butchered in a DCC installation (and secret deinstallation) from hell. One aspect was this locomotive (Atlas MP15) could not run slow at all with its hardwired motor. While the powerpack probably figured into things, it led to an odd discovery. Take a look at some of these Atlas DC boards (none of these pages picture a DCC board): Atlas (China) EMD MP15DC Atlas (China) GE Dash 8C's Atlas (China) GE U23B What stands out? For one, they are a lot more components then your average 1 resistor/2 LED Kato (or even older Atlas) board, and for another there is a big honking PIC microcontroller sitting on it! I still have to dig up my own tossed aside Atlas DC board to examine the traces more closely, but I'm beginning to think that Atlas has solved the issue of poor low speed performance and toy like top speeds (what they've called 'scale speed' motors) not through any remarkable type of new motor, but through clever electronics and software. If I'm right the PIC controller is measuring the incoming voltage and then applying tuned pulse power chosen to match Atlas's choice of motor. More or less then same thing most DCC decoders do when in analog mode, but without the delay needed to determine if it should run in DC or DCC mode. Am I way off on this theory, or just the last person to the party?
Your wrong, I have installed a lot of the Atlas scale speed motors in old Atlas, Atlas/Kato, and Kato locos, with the new motor they run just like a new Atlas.
<<Am I way off on this theory, or just the last person to the party? >> No, but maybe the first person with this kind of joke on April 1st. have fun Michael
Well...sounds good as a theory. But I have to agree from my experience that the scale speed motors installed in my old Atlas engines without the new PC boards do run just like the new Atlas engines with the PC boards. I don't think it is the PC board.
Well, does anyone know the purpose of the PIC? Manufacturers don't just include an item like that for free. Al
It's not a joke, but I am very interested in what a PIC controller on a DC board is being used for - there are no lighting effects I can see, and you certainly don't need a tiny computer and half a dozen supporting components to make directional LEDs work.
Temp, I just pulled the shell off of one of my newer U23's and there is no Pic on the board at all. What you are most likely seeing is a special circuit package to reduce the light flicker. Inside is only a diode bridge and an RC filter to take out the flickering. On some other boards, theses are discrete elements, and what you are seeing is probably a special package that internalizes all of these elements.
This is correct. And, in fact, if they WANTED to create a DC board that did PIC-based motor control, the easiest - and likely, given sales volumes, cheapest - way to implement that would be to drop in a DCC decoder and just not tell anybody. It would save all the development expense of a DC-only PIC controller and also piggyback instead of splitting the PCBA volumes.
I don't know where you got your information, but I have to agree with WCL and TwinDad, those are definitely, without a doubt, DCC decoders.
Just because they say that a DCC equiped loco is available does not mean that they didn't use a photo of one. None of the light boards in my MP15's looked like that.
