Paragon 2 upgrade, smoke control?

[SkipGear]

I have a customer that is now getting ready to go into his 3rd Paragon 2 decoder in an HO PRR H-10. I'm thinking about ditching the paragon 2 and replacing it as it seems to be a bit fragile but the problem is, what to do with the smoke system. Does anything aftermarket have the ability to control their fan driven smoke system?

[reinhardtjh]

I don't know the details, but ESU does have a smoke control in the LokSound 5 decoders.  I think they have their own smoke unit but I think the decoder can be set to control others.

[peteski]

And here I thought that by "smoke control" you were asking how to prevent decoder burnouts. 

While I never explored it, ZIMO also has some smoke generator/and fan capabilities.  But I have no clue as to how to set that up.  Some of the info migth be in the respective decoder brand's manuals, some might be gathered by asking questions  in the online groups dedicated to those decoders.

https://groups.io/g/ZIMO-DCC
https://groups.io/g/Loksound

ESU also has an online forum tied to their website, but I'm not sure how active it is.

[SkipGear]

Thanks,
 I needed a direction to look. Most of the installs I have been doing are Soundtraxx due to the fact that I am not prepared to bite the bullet and by the loksound programmer. Maybe this will be enough to justify it.

[jdcolombo]

Hi Tony.

If you download the LokSound 5 manual and look at pages 39-40 and 80-83, you'll see that there is some discussion of smoke unit control with the LokSound 5.  On pages 82-83, there is a list of function key settings, which includes several references to smoke generator control, including sound controlled smoke unit, Seuthe smoke unit, fan control, steam trigger, etc.

Since I only do N scale, I don't know what any of these things do, or if you can adjust them for use with a BLI smoke unit.  You might want to consider posting a question on the ESU LokSound group at Groups.io that Peteski linked to; folks there should be able to help, since there are a lot of HO and larger scale modelers on that group.

John C.