well we had to ask...

Didn't we!


Insatiably curious souls that we are, we just had to ask.

Di,

I was just checking my email and noted that I had nothing since last week

from NMRANET NMRANETWG on Yahoo, so I checked, it seems to have disappeared...

Something happened?

at 7:57pm EST today, and the reply:

The sites have been closed.

Didrik

I have corrected my group naming error in the text above, what I crossed out is exactly what I sent to Didrik Voss.

So what do we make of this? Is Didrik basically saying that NMRAnet is dead in his mind? I mean if the working group nos no group to work in what are we supposed to do? Or is he telling us not so subtly that we can all go play in our own sandbox because he has taken control of the NMRAnet sandbox for himself? Or is he merely trying to remove the evidence? Just as well a few full mailboxes of those groups exist around the place then isn't it! At least we haven't lots years of work. Despite the fact that all of the files in those groups are gone now.

Vale NMRAnet

As of today, April 11, 2011 (and no this is not a late April fools piece) the two currently active NMRAnet discussion group on Yahoo Groups have disappeared! No notice to any of the members. Not even a word to the moderators. One of the moderators went to check why there was no email coming from the list, and guess what he found.

It's actually just a continuation of what has been a pretty torrid history for groups talking about NMRA. Back in mid-2005 David Harris established a group called MRR-LCB - to discuss layout control bus ideas! That group remained active, albeit sometimes sporadically, until mid-2010. Some discussion was entered into on the old NMRA DCC working group, but after the Detroit convention in 2007 a group known as NMRANET-WG-TECH was formed and operated from September 2007 until June 2010 - just before the NMRA convention in Milwaukee in July. Out of a discussion at Milwaukee with two gentlemen who agreed to try and moderate the discussion a new list, NMRANET was established about July 28th 2010 and continued in use until April 6th 2011.

NMRANET-WG-TECH was still alive on Yahoo today as was NMRANET but another group which had a transient life for a few weeks back in the first half of 2010, NMRANET-Applications, and NMRANETWG have now disappeared altogether.

Seems that our friend, one of the VossBros, has been trying to destroy the evidence out there! Or maybe he has decided that only the brothers can agree on what THEY actually want, and so they will handle it all themselves now? Who knows?

Not us! We are just the working group members, interested model railroaders and the interested manufacturers, we obviously don't matter.

NMRAnet falters

Despite a lot of press indicating that the NMRA board actually approved an NMRAnet physical layer, the NMRA legal people and senior officers say they did not! The erroneously placed information is expected to be removed from the NMRA web site very shortly. In the meantime it has been confirmed that the NMRA Board has in fact issued an invitation for the working group to present to them in Sacramento in July.

I understand that a lot of email and phone contact has been had between the working group and the NMRA to clear up a number of issues. That is now possibly in hand and we can proceed in a more orderly fashion, we hope.

Who would have thought

That today Texas Instruments would announce that it proposes to acquire National Semiconductor. All of which led me to describe some of the history to a colleague:

TI was one of the first semiconductor companies, and is hugely well established, they acquired Burr-Brown (specialist analog house) some years back and more recently Luminary Micro - the first ARM-Cortex M3 implementor. TI is possibly the largest Digital Signal Processing chip maker and is also the originator of the DLP digital projector technology. Their ARM Cortex-A8 and A9 chips are used in cell phones and console products. Back in the 60's the integrated circuit was invented basically simultaneously by TI and Fairchild.

National was spawned by Sperry with a group of Sperry staff creating National in Danbury CT. In 1965 they acquired Molectro, and gained as employees Dave Talbot and Bob Widlar who were ex-Fairchild and possibly the leading IC designers of the era. In 1967 Chrlie Sporck was hired away form Fairchild and once again the bedevilled raltionship between Widlar and Sprock turned to fire. Then in 1968 National moved to Santa Clara and was well known for poaching staff from Fairchild. with designers like Bob Widlar they soon took the analog market by storm, they were a massive power house in discrete transistors (not power), CMOS logic and specialty chips including a number of early micros. In the end they swallowed up Fairchild (1987) and eventually spat it out again in 1997.

TI ranks 4th in the industry with 4.3% market share and about $30bn in revenue. National now ranks down there, with $1.42bn of revenues last year. The big thing is the massive consolidation of commodity semiconductors houses. In recent years TI and National have slugged it out in the commodity chip market, now we will have to wait and see what synergies work out and which product lines disappear. Two of the great names now rolled into one maybe!

The wide world of LCB's.

Layout Control Buses that is.

As with any efforts to produce standards, particularly open ones, their has been an attrition of projects in recent years. Layout Control Buses for model railroads are not new, but those that exist now are often based on simplistic and not greatly flexible schemes. Possibly the classic is Dr Bruce Chubbs C/MRI which first appeared in Model Railroader magazine in February of 1985. Based on a simple microprocessor module with an RS-485 or RS-422 interface, connected to a PC, the C/MRI system then uses a series of IO expansion cards to connect to pretty much anything. Updated fairly regularly the Chubb designs are now starting to show their age but are still a viable control system. Information and parts can be found at the JLC Enterprises website.

From the ever industrious MERG group in the UK comes Gordon Hopkins RPC system. Of similar vintage and technology to the Chubb system RPC relies on a series of interconnected interface boards. Having the pleasure of meeting Gordon I can only attest to his keen modelling interest and his designs reflect that. However like the Chubb system it is now getting dated, much of the work on it having been done in the late 90's.

In 2007 or so their again emerged from MERG the CBUS system conceived and developed by Mike Bolton in the UK and Gil Fuchs in California. Based on CAN bus this comparatively new system marks the beginning of the new LCB era. General purpose modules, well connected, using something akin to the producer/consumer model of operation. CBUS has a Yahoo Group as well. The boards are based on PIC controllers with CAN bus. The early boards had some issues with ground bounce and offset, but the later 12V board versions are reported to be somewhat more stable. However the practicve of sharing ground and power for the communications and operation power does detract form the stability of larger layouts. CBUS is a credit to its developers and certainly deserves a look.

OpenLCB arrived on the scene also in 2007 but began life in 2005 when I designed a DCC and accessory system that never saw the light of production. Discussions surrounding this approach stimulated Dr. David Harris and myself to explore further and through our acquaintance with Alex Shepherd in New Zealand we started devising what was at first an object oriented network which transitioned to a producer consumer network as we developed. The principal developers for OpenLCB are myself, David Harris, Bob Jacobsen (of J/MRI) and Alex Shepherd. Their is also an active Yahoo Group. Some hardware has been designed and is in use but much OpenLCB development was done on the Silicon Railway LEDuino (which includes CAN bus, DCC decoder input and rudimentary response signalling, LocoNet interface and the usual serial and USB interfaces) and other Arduino type boards. John Plocher has an Arduino model railway shield.

Don Voss proposed an RS-485 based system (as I recall) which he later moved to CAN bus in 2008 or so. Very little data has been published, but what has can be found linked on the largely outdated NMRAnet website as the S9.5 system.

There have been others, but quite honestly the details are rather vague in my mind right now and I would have to dig back into history. I should also say that I am directly involved with OpenLCB, and I have been a part of the NMRAnet community since essentially before it existed!

Tune in again for some technical discussion very soon.

As Time Goes By...

A beautiful song, but should it be appropriate to look back on a post that is nearly two and a half years old (April 2008) and realise that nothing has really changed?

Back then I wrote about the NMRA (National Model Railroad Association) and the various attempts at a model railroad layout control bus (LCB) standards formulation. And as I look back over it all I find that nothing has really changed. The on guy who hijacked the process is still trying to bully other participants to his way of thinking whilst at the same time refusing to expose any of his design work, code, or draft standards. His brother happens to be the corporate officer responsible for the standards and compliance process. What a lovely cozy position to be in.

I meant to post these remarks a few days ago, but they got forgotten. However in light of what I wrote earlier today they remain no less appropriate.

If at first you dont succeed, just wait, they will kick you again!

As of today it seems the news is out. The board did actually consider the matter, and now we know officially. The NMRAnet working group hasn't been told yet, nor have the authors of the document submitted.

NMRANET standard adopted

The board reviewed two versions of S-9.x.1 for the definition of the physical layer of the

layout control bus called NMRANET. The version modified by Didrik Voss, manager of

the Standards & Conformance Dept., was adopted. With this approval, the sponsors for

the other version will be invited to present their concerns to the Board at the Sacramento

meeting. S-9.x.1 was re-designated as S-9.5.1 and will be posted on the NMRA web site.

Several manufacturers of electronics for model railroading have been waiting for this

new NMRA standard so they can adopt it for their product line.

The actual BOD meeting report summary can be found online here.

As well as not being informed even informally about the BOD meeting considerations and vote we have yet to receive our invitation to address the board in Sacramento in July. Let's hope it arrives soon, we need to dust off all the material that we guess wasn't presented to the board in February. But why does it have to be this way?

We don't know in any detail what happened at the BOD meeting, today is the first we know of anything other than the appearance of the S9.5.1 document on the NMRA web site. What is even more galling is that we now know that the NMRA board has sanctioned a document which is a derivative work from material where copyright is claimed by its authors. No permission was sought or granted, no acknowledgement given. It is as though the NMRA feels it is above the provisions of copyright law in the US and Canada (two of the authors are either Canadian or Canadian residents) and the DMCA in the USA. Pretty shabby treatment really when all things are considered.

Back in December 2010 I responded to a help wanted ad placed with Gerry Leone, communications director for the NMRA, for electronics engineers to help with the development of NMRAnet. This request was never sent to the NMRAnet working group list, nor to the DCC working group list. But it was in the NMRA magazine and so I responded. The day after Gerry acknowledged my email I received this response form Di Voss:

John,

 

You must be the only Electronics Engineer in Canada or, at least, the only one that responds to my help wanted ads.

Since you are already part of the effort, I do not need to provide you a summary of our work.

 

Didrik

It seems that my work is to continue to provide soundly based, well argued professional work. Seems that my job is to accept being treated like a mushroom, kept in the dark and fed with .... well, I think you know the answer (at least any self respecting Aussie would). I am to toil diligently in the fields, submit my work, have it used to creative a derivative document without permission or acknowledgement, not be told what the considerations of the material submitted are and to just keep on taking it and liking it.

So disheartening, so disillusioning. No wonder nobody wants to play in the NMRAnet or NMRA-DCC sandboxes any more, if this is how we are to be treated. Onwards and upwards OpenLCB!

Why? He asked...

Would Don want to change the heavily discussed and argued OpenLCB physical layer standard (already voted and accepted within the OpenLCB community) and modify it?

Several of my colleagues at work and elsewhere have been heavily involved with CAN bus for some little time now. So over the last few days a couple of us have used our break time to kick around some ideas in an attempt to figure out why Don was so insistent that these changes be included. All of the comments that I recall related to increasing the number of nodes allowable on a given length network.

Three factors influence the length of the network.

• The round trip propagation delay between the two most remote nodes.
• Voltage changes due to the intrinsic resistance of the cable and the Rdiff of the individual receivers
• Waveform distortion or signal level attenuation due to the effective distributed capacitance of the transmission line.

Cable: The specification as we established it calls for the use of CAT 5e cable, which according to the ISO11801 standard should have nominally 5.7ns/m delay. But this is purely for the cable, it does not include connectors, PCB's with their own intrinsic capacitance and the effects of any common mode chokes or ESD protection devices. Prudent manufacturers may choose to include common mode chokes, ESD clamping diodes or varistors for protection. All of these add capacitance which will increase Vp and reduce the maximum cable length as well as add waveform distortion as alluded to above.

Resistance: We are assuming, that despite their being no explanation of the derivation of the constant in the numerator of the equation, that the VossBros equation assumes a 90 ohm/kilometre resistance. And thats fine, but our concern here is that not only does the VossBros change actually not specify what Ri is, nor does it spell out how that constant was derived. That equation does not appear to take into account any parasitic or stray capacitance introduced by PCBs, connectors, ESD protection or whatever.

Waveforms: Anybody who knows anything about transmission lines knows that rise and fall times are a function of bandwidth. Compromising bandwidth with capacitance means that to get the performance we have to reduce capacitance, which means reducing cable length. If you are to allow users to calculate the maximum network length, or max number of nodes for a given length, then capacitive effects must be taken into account, but in the VossBros documents they are not.

The OpenLCB standard offered to the NMRA (but butchered by VossBros) specified the important maxima, length and number of nodes. Why was that so hard to understand? I have one possible hypothesis. At one point the concept of gateways and bridges was discussed with the S9.5/Voss group. It seems that in their own opinion bridges don't play well with their protocol. Of course we can't offer much more of an opinion because no details of their protocol have ever been published. But that could explain the obsession with maximising the number of nodes. So an S9.5/Voss based LCB could be limited to the 111 or 112 or whatever number of nodes. OpenLCB/S9.6 on the other hand can use bridges and gateways to create much larger LCB's.

de Javu all over again.

When I wrote a day or so back about the NMRA process for standardising the very first part of their desired NMRAnet little did I know that a decision had already been made. Of course, the usual dictums of common courtesy seemed to have escaped the NMRA Board of Directors and the Standards and Compliance Manager. The working group was not informed. The authors of the document were not informed. The standard merely appeared at some point. The next line on the index page points to the as yet non-existent technical note.

At least in the version finally published some of the material so offended the Standards department manager was restored. But the sad part is that the changes which remain are just as offensive to the technical community. Even more amusing is that what we have asked for over so many months, something that supports the assertions of Don Voss, still hasn't been supplied, nor is it included either in the standard as published, or in the draft TN (the real one we dont know).

The standard suggests that we can adopt CAN bus yet vary it. I wonder if somebody, like Robert Bosch the inventors of CAN bus, has copyright control! The bastardised CAN bus we are presented with sinmply is not CAN bus. The Voss brothers ask that we accept that CAN bus certification of a component is required, but that an essential CAN bus specification, Rdiff(min), must be >20kohm. But Rdiff(min) is only tested to be >10kohm for CAN bus certification. A transceiver manufacturer may, but is not compelled to, state what Rdiff actually is, or the range that may be encountered.

All of this when they went to such lengths to try and justify this variation using data and application notes designed to sell specific products. By including a formula in the standard for determining the maximum theoretical under ideal conditions network length WHICH INCLUDES Rdiff AS A PARAMETER! Well, they sneakily dont say that, they include 20,000 as a constant. When in reality the maximum langth of the network, under those same conditions (or the maximum number of nodes) could be longer or larger if the original equation from NXP were used and the effective Rdiff left in place. Of course, after FOUR years of discussion it is hard to expect such rigour to be part of the standard isn't it?

Like I said, what did we really expect? Procedural fairness? Honesty and technical integrity? Openess of process and procedure? Well, this is the NMRA after all.

Seems some things never change! The NMRAnet saga 3 years on

When I wrote my post yesterday referring to the debacle surrounding the NMRA and the NMRAnet process I had in the back of my mind that this had been going on for a long time, what I had forgotten was that I posted on  the same broken process back in April of 2008, close to three whole years ago. In that post I referred to the process that had been going off the rails routinely for the previous 12 months. Which means this debacle must have been going on for about 4 years now!

Insane.....

And we still can't get a sensible word out of the NMRA process.

During that time an amazing group of people have developed the bulk of a standard series and protocol family known as OpenLCB. Their work and their efforts in the NMRAnet working group have formed the basis of the S9.x.1 standard proposal which has been butchered by the amateurs I referred to yesterday. As a part of that effort I find the last minute unsupported modifications outside of the working group process to be an abomination.

How much longer does it have to go on?

Or maybe it needs to come to a stop now, and like the DCC working group before it, fade into oblivion. Since June of 2009 the DCC community has been split in two. A US based manufacturers group which only admits established large scale commercial DCC manufacturers to its discussions, and a European group which insists that all its meetings will be in Europe and business conducted in German. If the NMRAnet working group persists, then I wonder how long it will be before we come to the same impasse?

In the meantime maybe the "OpenLCB" group on Yahoo groups is a good place for anybody wnating to know what an LCB (Layout Control Bus) really looks like.

When amateurs dabble

When amateurs dabble in technology we see all sorts of things happen. Some are amazingly good, the Arduino would be an example of that. From small beginnings a group of hackers and hobbyists have changed the face of microprocessor learning and development. A true paradigm shift.

But for the last few months I have spent many hours working to try and bring some sanity to the NMRA (National Model Railroad Association) standards discussion over a model railway layout control mechanism they want to sponsor called NMRAnet.

The development of the scheme was to be co-operative, but never open. However in the end the brother of the Standards Manager for the organisation left the co-operative discussion and took no further part in the working group established by volunteers to develop the scheme. This same former member of the working group then had his brother modify the documents submitted by the working group to include his own favoured changes. Sadly they were generally ill-considered and had the backing of nobody in the working group.

So now we stand at an impasse, two versions of the documents will be put to the board of directors. We wonder which will survive, the original which is sound, rigorous and based on ISO and other standards, or the modified, crippled version, which removes several of the most basic safeguards to the reliability of the network.

Who knows, buyt in teh past it seems tat no matter how ill advised the changes unilaterally proposed by the Standards Manager they have been accepted. Lets hope the NMRA Board of Directors changes their minds this time.