Yūkari Layout Building

[Kingmeow]

From what I heard around the internet, Zimo decoders have the best motor control.

[chadbag]

My Zimo have worked great.  I only have a few (including one hacked into one of the EM13 boards that I had made).  I only have a few though I intend to get more as needed.  My D&H have also seemed to work well.  I have not explicitly tried tests in a structured way but they seemed to work well at low or very low speeds.

Edited December 2 by chadbag

[Martijn Meerts]

I have an older Zimo in 1 of my Piko trains, but I've never been very happy with how the train runs. I wasn't really able to get it to run well either. Might very well be Zimo introduced newer versions of the decoder by now. I tend to go with ESU decoders. Especially the Lokpilot 5 comes in a really small version that fits in pretty much anything, and there are quite a few CVs to adjust for finetuning the motor control for low, medium and high speeds. It can be a pain and time consuming to dial it in though.

 

 

[Junech]

One of my club's DCC experts will choose Zimo over Esu because of customer service and other reasons. He goes on about Zimo replacing multiple defective decoders that are sent in without batting an eye. Additionally, you can update the software versions of Zimo decoders longer than Esu decoders.

 

49 minutes ago, Martijn Meerts said:

Might very well be Zimo introduced newer versions of the decoder by now.

 You may try to update the decoder's software and see if it runs better.

 

50 minutes ago, Martijn Meerts said:

finetuning the motor control for low, medium and high speeds

This also can be done with Zimo decoders. We measured in all H0e locomotives to prototypical speeds.

 

I can ask him for more information on what software he uses for the full process.

[Martijn Meerts]

I've had ESU replace decoders without question as well. But that was also quite a while ago, so things may have changed since then. I will have a look into updating the Zimo decoder I have. The train it's in is currently loaned out to my brother, so it might take a while.

 

I'm always interested in what decoders and software people use. So I would appreciate it if you could send me some more info, either in a PM, or maybe in a separate post. Pretty sure some people would be interested in the process of finetuning motor control for optimal running. It sometimes feels almost like voodoo 😄