I have three BLI Blueline SD7's (with BLI Blueline Sound/Light and Digitrax DZ143PS decoders) and I am going to run them together in a consist. Since I run my locomotives on several layouts (at the club and at some friends), to keep things simple, I have programmed all three to the same four digit address. I have programmed the direction (Front=Short Hood Forward, Middle=Long Hood Forward, Rear=Long Hood Forward) and sounds appropriate to position in consist on each individual locomotive. My final issue is programming the lights. I need the long hood light off in the front unit, all lights off in the mid unit and the long hood light off in the rear unit...with the short hood lights in the front and rear units being directional. I've downloaded the BLI technical manual and gone through the light CV's...tried a number of settings with no luck so far. There has to be something I am missing here. Does anyone know the CV settings to turn off the front or rear lights individually?
If all are programmed to take commands using the same # then I don't think you can. The easy way around this is to consist your units using thier actual # and select each loco in the cosist one at a time to turn off the lights. Then when you dial up your consist you should be golden.
First of all, it is possible to do this. Of course you will program each locomotive separately as you have already done with the direction of travel. The easiest way would be to use function remapping to re-map all of the lights that you don't want to turn on. The CVs involved are 33 and 34, which control the behavior of F0F and F0R. (I don't know if changing the normal direction travel changes which is which.) The default for 33 is 1, which means it turns on the 'white wire', and the default for 34 is 2, which means that it turns on the 'yellow' wire. In a hard-wired decoder the wires are actually those colors, and normally these wires are connected to the forward and reverse lights. In a plug-and-play decoder those are just names for the connections to forward and reverse LEDs. The instructions are not written to explain how to disable a function, but you might try simply writing a value of zero to CVs 33 and 34. I have not tried this myself but I think it ought to work. If it causes problems, I'm sure you could program both of these CVs to 4 and then function 0 would turn on the green wire (which you presumably have nothing connected to). For more info, see page 50 of the Digitrax decoder manual... http://www.digitrax.com/ftp/Decoder%20Manual.pdf
Normally I set the first loco CV33=1 (front on in consist fwd) and CV34=0 (off) and the second CV33=0 (off) and CV34=2 (front on in consist reverse). Intermediate locos are CV33=0 and CV34=0 (all lights off). Are the lights operating the same, ie. all on in direction of travel? If this is the case, I think you are having problems with all locos being set to the same address. When the next command is sent, it is sent to the consist number to change the lights accordingly, except all locos are the same and react equally.
