LCC III - Messaging
Back in October I started what I thought would be a relatively easy, if perhaps a bit long, post on messaging in LCC. I was trying to cover it in detail, explaining how the ideal LCC had to be adapted on CAN Bus. That proved distracting and I put that material aside to just focus on the basic messaging capabilities of LCC rather than the implementation on CAN Bus, at least to the extent I could.
In the process of doing this, I've managed to chase myself in circles more than a few times. The LCC standards are very confusing, even by NMRA standards. We're talking about documents written by volunteers rather than professional standards-writers, and generally without a whole lot of editing. I've been reading NMRA standards for more than 25 years and I'm used to having to work at it to puzzle out the actual meaning. But still, the lack of clarity in the LCC documents is exceptional.
I'll detail problem areas throughout this post, but it basically boils down to things either being omitted entirely from the documents or being covered in one of the other technical notes than the one you’d expect. And there's a fair bit of using two different names for the same thing and, conversely, using similar names for two different things.
The revised post is about messaging in LCC and what you can do with it now, and additionally I'm coming at this as a review of the LCC standards, not anything external to them. The OpenLCB team has written a lot of words about OpenLCB, and that’s often helpful, but what matters in a standard is what's actually incorporated in it, either directly or by reference to or citation of an external document.
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In the process of doing this, I've managed to chase myself in circles more than a few times. The LCC standards are very confusing, even by NMRA standards. We're talking about documents written by volunteers rather than professional standards-writers, and generally without a whole lot of editing. I've been reading NMRA standards for more than 25 years and I'm used to having to work at it to puzzle out the actual meaning. But still, the lack of clarity in the LCC documents is exceptional.
I'll detail problem areas throughout this post, but it basically boils down to things either being omitted entirely from the documents or being covered in one of the other technical notes than the one you’d expect. And there's a fair bit of using two different names for the same thing and, conversely, using similar names for two different things.
The revised post is about messaging in LCC and what you can do with it now, and additionally I'm coming at this as a review of the LCC standards, not anything external to them. The OpenLCB team has written a lot of words about OpenLCB, and that’s often helpful, but what matters in a standard is what's actually incorporated in it, either directly or by reference to or citation of an external document.
Read More...
