JMRI PanelPro and good friends
My name is Nick Kulp. My good friend Dick Bronson has provided me with another "15 minutes of fame" with his part in your column. Dick and his company http://www.rr-cirkits.com played a huge part in my original clinic. I found his DCC detection circuit kits when I first decided to signal my Cornwall Railroad and his support and excellent kits made it affordable in those early days. The main hardware I used for my signaling was Dr. Bruce Chubb's C/MRI but when I added NCE Switchit accessory controllers to my layout, the DOS-based QBASIC program I was using for my signaling became useless. I started looking into VB 6 and asking members on different Yahoo groups for help in learning how to write a program that would work with both types of hardware. Bob Jacobsen contacted me and said he was working on a JAVA-based program and asked if I would test it on my layout. I said absolutely, sent Bob the source file for my QBASIC program and Bob sent me a test file. It tested a few of the signals I had installed along with input sensors. It worked great and within less than a week, Bob sent a file that included all of my signals, sensors and DCC controlled switches. There were a few glitches since Bob had never seen my layout and was working from an "overhead" view of my track-plan and a linear display. Different graphics for switch levers were donated by another member of the "loconet -hackers" group and the rest is pretty much PanelPro history. I felt that since these guys worked so hard on a FREE product and my layout was the first to BETA test it, I wanted to give back. That led me to create the first clinic on how to use PanelPro. It was a real experience. I gave a few of those clinics at train shows and tested many different types of hardware like the SE8c from digitrax, the Smini C/MRI nodes and even some of Dick Bronson's early hardware like the TC64. Through those clinics, I also met a LOT of great people, Dick and his wife Karen, are great examples. I also made it my mission to show folks that using a computer program to add signaling to a model railroad did NOT require the modeler had to become a computer programmer. The simplicity of JMRI and it's ability to work with almost any number of different hardware systems helped make it so. Over the past 15 or more years, I have helped a LOT of people add signaling to their layouts. It is part of my philosophy of giving back to the group as a thank you for all of the kindness and help when I first started. I provided guys like Bob Bucklew with mere basic information to get them started and most of them have far exceeded my simple methods on creating a CTC panel. My original panel (shown on page 79 of Don Feihmann's "The DCC Guide Second Edition" Kalmbachbooks.com ) looks like a child's scrawling in comparison to Bob Bucklew's beautiful CTC panel. This software has probably caused more model railroaders to add signaling to their layouts than any other commercial-based product. I am glad to have been a part of the start of it and proud to have helped so many people get more out of the hobby.
Regards,
Nick Kulp
President and Hired Lackey Grade 3
Cornwall Railroad
