SPROG II DCC

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Support is first introduced in revision 520.

The SPROG II is a relative easy to use and cheap, £ 52,- (British Pound) incl. shipping to western Europe, DCC Programmer with some extra's.

• 128 loco slots
• auto purging
• 14, 28 and 128 speed steps
• 28 mobile decoder functions
• programming on the main (OPS)
• service track programming
• stationary DCC decoders

• Only the default speed step is supported for rolling road: 128¹

¹) The mode word is currently not changed if the speed step of a loco is not set to 128.

Rocrail sends every 25ms a byte string like ”O 73 3F CC 80” as a command to SPROG II which on its turn generates the real DCC packet on the track output.
This byte string is a hexadecimal representation of the DCC packet to be send. A complete refresh cycle will take about 4 seconds if all 128 slots are in use.

• Programming with Rocrail

Only the IID and the serial port has to be set, the rest is fixed in the firmware of the SPROG II.

Running Debian the SPROG II is not automatically mapped to a /dev/ttyUSBx device:

Jun  5 10:44:48 rocdev kernel: [ 4014.514807] usb 1-1: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 3
Jun  5 10:44:48 rocdev kernel: [ 4014.720990] usb 1-1: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
Jun  5 10:44:48 rocdev kernel: [ 4014.729352] usb 1-1: New USB device found, idVendor=0403, idProduct=f0c8
Jun  5 10:44:48 rocdev kernel: [ 4014.729365] usb 1-1: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
Jun  5 10:44:48 rocdev kernel: [ 4014.729371] usb 1-1: Product: SPROG DECODER PROGRAMMER
Jun  5 10:44:48 rocdev kernel: [ 4014.729376] usb 1-1: Manufacturer: SPROG DCC
Jun  5 10:44:48 rocdev kernel: [ 4014.729381] usb 1-1: SerialNumber: feedcode

After adding the line:

SYSFS{idProduct}=="f0c8", SYSFS{idVendor}=="0403", RUN+="/sbin/modprobe -q ftdi_sio product=0xf0c8 vendor=0x0403"

into the file /etc/udev/rules.d/50-udev.rules it does map, after a reboot, SPROG II as a ttyUSBx device:

Jun  5 10:57:28 rocdev kernel: [  181.195015] usb 1-1: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 2
Jun  5 10:57:28 rocdev kernel: [  181.458930] usb 1-1: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
Jun  5 10:57:28 rocdev kernel: [  181.468793] usb 1-1: New USB device found, idVendor=0403, idProduct=f0c8
Jun  5 10:57:28 rocdev kernel: [  181.468807] usb 1-1: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
Jun  5 10:57:28 rocdev kernel: [  181.468813] usb 1-1: Product: SPROG DECODER PROGRAMMER
Jun  5 10:57:28 rocdev kernel: [  181.468818] usb 1-1: Manufacturer: SPROG DCC
Jun  5 10:57:28 rocdev kernel: [  181.468823] usb 1-1: SerialNumber: feedcode
Jun  5 10:57:28 rocdev kernel: [  181.713765] usbcore: registered new interface driver usbserial
Jun  5 10:57:28 rocdev kernel: [  181.713765] usbserial: USB Serial support registered for generic
Jun  5 10:57:28 rocdev kernel: [  181.713765] usbcore: registered new interface driver usbserial_generic
Jun  5 10:57:28 rocdev kernel: [  181.713765] usbserial: USB Serial Driver core
Jun  5 10:57:28 rocdev kernel: [  181.721774] usbserial: USB Serial support registered for FTDI USB Serial Device
Jun  5 10:57:28 rocdev kernel: [  181.721774] ftdi_sio 1-1:1.0: FTDI USB Serial Device converter detected
Jun  5 10:57:28 rocdev kernel: [  181.721774] ftdi_sio: Detected FT232RL
Jun  5 10:57:28 rocdev kernel: [  181.721774] usb 1-1: FTDI USB Serial Device converter now attached to ttyUSB0
Jun  5 10:57:28 rocdev kernel: [  181.721774] usbcore: registered new interface driver ftdi_sio
Jun  5 10:57:28 rocdev kernel: [  181.721774] ftdi_sio: v1.4.3:USB FTDI Serial Converters Driver

• Home of SPROG II
• Boutique-Train.fr, distributeur du SPROG II en France
• User group at Yahoo