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!

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.