Hornby HM7000 TXS Decoder Install - Hornby 9F

hi there and welcome back to another episode at Station Road now today is a continuation of the previous video where I looked at installing one of Hall bed's new TSX Bluetooth decoders into this halogen dp2 so today's video is of course now looking at installing the TSX chip into the Hornby 9f no so if you watched the previous video and there's a link in the top corner for that the original plan of course was to try and cover both locomotives in one video but as I mentioned in that previous video I got into some rather sticky complications with the Hornby 9f and in the end I decided it was best to separate that out into a separate video which is what this video is today so this is the Hornby 9f here now this is not the most recent version of their 9f just recently they of course did a retooling for their 9f and I do have one of those it's a beautiful locomotive but this is the previous version so quite old tooling but it is the slightly updated mechanism so it's not the old ring field motor and the tender it is actually locomotive driven and of course the tender has the DCC socket and also some allowance for a speaker so one of the other aspects that I did have a crack at when I was working at installing this locomotive was actually trying out the new Android version of the app so I do have a spare Android phone which I do use for my design work so I thought I'd have a go with the Android app and see if there was any difference now that added of course some further complications to the install with hence why this is a separate video so I think without further Ado let's just get into what I got up to in some of the curly situations I encountered right so the next logo I thought I'd try of course is a steam locomotive now I will say I'm not actually overly a fan of steam sound in models that just kind of doesn't sound right the Diesels seem to sound better than how a steam locomotive sounds but I thought we'd give it a go anyway so of course we've got a Hornby 9f here it's the evening star this is one of the later models they made where they switch to locomotive drive and of course the tender is fully accessible and available for speakers and also sterilize and things like that so just has actually got to stay alive in it at the moment I bought the second hand somewhere and I didn't actually realize that it actually had all of this fitted in it so of course that will come out but there's plenty of room in there for the large speaker baffle and also I could fit a stay alive in there too if I wanted to but we'll see how it goes so we've got our normal sort of wire connections between the tender and the locomotive so the product here of course is the eight pin decoder so this is sort of going back to the issue I had with the first locomotive I did in the previous video and where I'd actually plugged the eight pin decoder in the wrong way around and I think that may have been what caused the DCC address to get a little bit scrambled so it's clearly marked here actually on this particular one here that pin 4 is actually marked so theoretically I shouldn't really get this around the the wrong way this time so we'll get this installed and then we'll go through the same process and see how it works right so I've now installed the eight pin decoder in here and also the speaker and largest baffle they have available in the tender just temporarily it should all fit in there quite nicely once I put the cover back over the tender now just to change it up a little bit what I'm actually going to use is the Android version which of course has just been launched recently so I have an Android phone I actually just use it simply for testing web development and so forth for my graphic design job so this is a Galaxy a12 so it's not exactly the flashest of phones so I've installed the hm7000 app and it seemed to install Okay And as far as I can see it's not on hornby's list of incompatible Android devices so we'll switch on once again the track power and let's just see if we can link up to this device right okay so we don't seem to be getting any action here now I have firmed that my Bluetooth has been activated on the phone so theoretically it should be able to find the device well we're not getting very far so far with Android just going to grab my iPhone and actually just see whether it picks up the device so I'm just going to move this out of the way bringing the iPhone and just see what happens right okay so it's found it straight away so that's interesting what is happening with the Android so I go to just close that for a second maybe I might need to do an update we'll do this and then come back so after about a kazillion updates because I don't use this phone very often so the Android software was very out of date and it went through quite a few updates I also went into the app setting for the hm7000 and just double checked that the permissions for Bluetooth were activated and they actually weren't so although I clicked to allow permissions for some reason it hadn't actually activated so it's under permissions and it's nearby devices and it's basically to allow permissions for nearby devices so I'm kind of hoping that that is going to solve the problem so if we go back into our app and we'll now go back and see what happens if we link a device and still we have nothing right okay I've done a lot of mucking around with this and Bluetooth is on the app has access to Bluetooth and I'm just getting nothing so I don't know what the story is with the Android maybe this device is not compatible which is the Samsung a12 so let's just get that phone out of the way and bring our trusty old iPhone back in and yeah I mean it comes up straight away so we'll set it up with the iPhone I'm going to give up on Android it's why I use apple right okay so this one didn't turn out to be nearly as plain sailing as the dp2 so first of all the speaker that came in this one was knackered it just made a very high pitched hissing noise so I was hoping it was a speaker and not the actual decoder or actually the sound profile itself so I pinched the speaker out of the dp2 because we know that that was working quite well and and it is actually working so I'll switch the sound on in the second so I was able to eliminate that as a dud speaker so we'll run through some of the sounds and you know it's actually not too bad I guess four the nine F now I've dialed down the volume because the default volume is just far too high so these are being reduced down quite considerably [Music] [Music] [Applause] so as you can tell it actually doesn't sound too bad at all and that's just unfortunate the speaker that came with the eight pin Dakota pack turned out to be a dud now I am considering putting in this Mega bass speaker and it has the same ohm rating so I might just give this a go and see how it sounds now if I accidentally blow up the chip then it might unfold so we'll give it a go and maybe just see if this speaker will work in there actually before I do that let's see if it actually fits yeah so it fits in the body so we'll try this and see how it goes so I've already gone ahead chopped the wires off the Hornby supplied speaker and soldered them to this hence we get the nice sort of weak jst plug to plug into the decoder chip right okay we've got this megabase speaker just plonked in there at the moment and let's just see if it works and if it blows up I guess it blows up [Music] oh well it does work so I might use a speaker but obviously I'm going to have to get a baffle for the speaker so that it improves its sound a bit right so I've got a wee step further and actually created my own baffle for the speaker because it was over the weekend I wasn't able to get hold of one so this is just made out of plastic card and it's all sort of welded together with the humble cement and it seems to work okay so I'll just switch us on now foreign certainly made a difference to the sound quality sounds a little bit more throaty and Bassy but as I said before steam sound just doesn't quite sound right to me compared to diesel sound profiles so going back to trying to set this up with the Android phone I went back and had a check with the incompatibility lists and there's two lists that they've now put out with from the Hornby website one is actually dated last month and the other one was back in March and interestingly the March update lists the a12 as an in progress development so I'm going on the assumption that they still haven't actually sorted it out yet and the a12 is still yet to be formally made compatible with the DCC app and the Bluetooth chips so I'll just recap on some of the issues that I had with this particular installation into the 9f firstly of course there was the issue with the supplied speaker now when I say it was a high pitched hissing sound it was a high pitched sort of hiss in the background and a very muffled or faint sound that was actually producing the sounds from the profile it was very very muted and even with the volume up there was something clearly wrong with the speaker and of course as you saw previously I put in the speaker from the dp2 and there was no issues with that so the speaker for one was faulty and that's brand new out of the pack so if anyone comes across a situation like that where it feels like the sound is really really quiet or muted or it's got a sort of a hissy crackly sound to it then I would at first assume that maybe you've also been supplied with a dud speaker so the second thing was the DCC address issue and I have come to the conclusion so far that it seems to be more of an issue with the eight pin decoders than it is with the 21 pin decoders so when I entered the nine Triple Two address associated with the running number when I took that over to DCC for the jmri to read that address it just completely scrambled it the only I think one digit the first number was correct and all the other numbers were completely different so initially maybe I thought well okay maybe there's an issue with a four digit address because of course the dp2 was a three digit address so I dropped the two off the end so it was just nine two two and went through the same process and no it's scrambled that address as well so what I actually did in the end is I reprogrammed the address under jmri didn't alter any other settings I just simply reprogrammed the address to nine triple two then brought it back into the Bluetooth mode and then refreshed the CVS and there's a little refresh button up here and that actually then picked up the new address or the correct address that I had programmed under jmri and these values are determined by cv17 and cv18 which is part of the extended address and they give out these values one is two to eight the other one is value six and that can be worked out through a Nifty little Wii website that I found and there's a link in the description for that where you can enter your long address and it produces the the CV values that are needed for CV 17 and 18 and it came out correct but only after I did a refresh of the CV editor so there's clearly something not quite right I think in terms of the app being able to assign a long address correctly to the trip so hopefully in future updates from Hornby with the app that they'll iron out some of these glitches so finally in terms of the Android device as I mentioned I suspect the a12 sent on frame which I have is in progress with Hornby in terms of enabling its compatibility with this DCC app and the Bluetooth chips one of the interesting aspects within hornby's documentation is they strongly recommend not using a device more than five years old now the a12 is three years old so I think the the model I've got was introduced in 2020 so I'm assuming you know they are going to work on developing or improving the app to be more compatible with that device so I'd love to hear from anyone who has actually successfully managed to program a chip upload a profile using their Android phone and it'll be interesting to see what model of Android phone you were using in order to do the updates also I'd be interested to know from anyone who has a Samsung a12 and has been able to successfully upload a profile and program a chip via their phone and maybe there's just simply something I'm not doing right in my Android phone I'm pretty sure that I've got all the Bluetooth side of things set up correctly how it should be but not being an Android expert maybe there is something I missed so it'd be great to hear from anyone who is currently has an a12 and has successfully been able to use it with hornby's new Bluetooth decoder system so there we have it I finally managed to encounter a little bit of success in getting some sound into this locomotive using hornby's hm 7000 Bluetooth decoders so on finishing off the installation it was a simple case of inserting the speaker actually into the body component of the Tinder and gluing that in upside down and then of course that actually faces downwards out through where there's a speaker cavity that sends the sound out onto the track below so that actually worked out and it all fitted in quite nicely so it seems apparent that Hornby have yet to iron out some of the glitches within the decoders and also within the app and in my experience the eight pin decoder seems to encounter more issues than the 21 pin decoder did so I'm hoping that Hornby persevere with this and fine-tune both the app and of course the decoders because I do think it is a really fantastic system it's great to be able to purchase literally a blank sound chip and be able to install a sound profile of your own choice and even mix and match and take a decoder out of an old locomotive put it in a new locomotive in rewrite the sound profiles so yeah this endless sort of possibilities there but yet they just need to get some of these things ironed out some of the issues and glitches which I have encountered with these decoders now in terms of the dud speaker that I got that is a quality issue obviously they're not probably going to test every single speaker that leaves the factory but obviously I've encountered one that was faulty in some way so I'll leave it there for today I certainly hope there's some information in there that may help those who have questions about this Hornby DCC system so as always take care look after yourselves don't forget to like And subscribe and I will catch you next time bye for now

Channel: Station Road Model Railway

Views: 1,539

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Id: BmNwePqQq-w

Length: 24min 39sec (1479 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 10 2023