NCE PowerCab and HornbyR8216 Accessory decoder

Having come by some Hornby Accessory decoders R8216 I thought I'd see if I could program them with the PowerCab.

It took a little while to get my head around it, but sorted now!

First thing, you have to program the accessory decoder address in REGISTER mode! Nothing else will work.

Right connect a point motor to the first ouptut of the accessory decoder, this will show us the decoder is working.
Just for test purposes I connected the two output wires from the PowerCab power panel straight into the track input terminals on the decoder.

Now on the PowerCab press PROG/ESC button followed by the number 4 key(short cut to program track)
the screen will show
USE PROGRAM TRK
Press enter.
You should have on the display
1=STD 2=CV 3=REG press the number 3 button.

The screen will show
PROG TRK
REGISTER?
Type in the number of the register you want to look at or change.
We want to change register address 1 (This is the accessory address)

Screen will show:-

PROG TRK
REGISTER 1=

After a short while maybe 30secs it will then show can't read CV
Press enter
Screen will show

PROG TRK
REGISTER 1= ???

Type in the GROUP number you want to set this decoder to then press enter. See note below

I repeated this a few times just to make sure the internal capacitors had charged up.

Now press the PROG/ESC button to return to the main operating screen.
Press the SELECT ACCY button then enter a point address EG 1 to 4 followed by enter.
The on screen display will show 1=N(ON) 2=R(OFF)

By pressing 1 or 2 the point motor should fire across, if nothing happens repeat operating the point motor in the other direction just in case it's already in the correct position.
You can test further by connecting the point motor to each output and testing accessory addresses 1 through to 4.

NOTE

Where you enter the address, you have to remember it's in blocks of 4.
So if you put in address 1, it will automatically program outputs 1 to 4 with addresses 1 to 4 respectively.
Now if you want to add another decoder and have the next four ouput addresses as 5-8 you must use the group address of 2 in the step above in red.
Or if you want the next lot of addresses to be 9-12 you must use the group address 3

It's a bit of a misnomer really, your not actually programming the address but the group number:-

Group 1 gives output addresses 1-4
Group 2 gives output addresses 5-8
Group 3 gives output addresses 9-12
Group 4 gives output addresses 13-16
Group 5 gives output addresses 17-20

And so on etc.

I've been playing about with it most of this afternoon and it all works perfectly with the PowerCab.
You can use macros, if you want point addresses 1,2,3 and 4 to fire at once, when programming the macro actually use the correct address numbers 1 to 4.
Hope that makes sense, just ask if it doesn't!

Cheers