Other Lightboards
Up until now I’ve been concentrating on my Kato models as far as DCC conversion goes, and at the same time I’ve only really paid attention to the interior lighting of those cars. Now that I’m working up to large-scale DCC conversion of my non-Kato stock, which is mostly MicroAce and Greenmax at this point, I need to think about lighting the interior of those cars.
And it turns out, they’re pretty much identical. Both MicroAce and Tomix make their own interior lighting kits, and they’re very similar. A third-party company, F&MOKEI also makes lightboards, and claims they work with both manufacturers’ cars. And Greenmax notes compatibility of its cars with Tomix lights (Tomix is far larger a company than MicroAce, so it makes sense they only mention one).
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And it turns out, they’re pretty much identical. Both MicroAce and Tomix make their own interior lighting kits, and they’re very similar. A third-party company, F&MOKEI also makes lightboards, and claims they work with both manufacturers’ cars. And Greenmax notes compatibility of its cars with Tomix lights (Tomix is far larger a company than MicroAce, so it makes sense they only mention one).
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DCC Voltage and Cab Lights
’m turning my attention to the cab car decoder install now, and a recent discussion with Don along with a question from a reader had me thinking about potential problems with DCC conversion of N-scale EMU cars with cab lighting. And the one that really worried me was overvoltage from high DCC track voltages, and its harmful (fatal) effect on LEDs. DCC decoders essentially pass track voltage (minus a small bit) through to their function outputs.
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Wire
I went off on a tangent this past week. It all started when I asked myself: what gauge wire should I use on my decoders? And the root of that question was thinking that the wire I’d used on my first install, two weeks ago, was too thick. The answer turned out to be less obvious than I thought it would be, and consumed (and is still consuming; I’m not done) a lot of time.
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November 2012 Status
November, as you may have noticed from recent posts, went largely to laying the groundwork for installing wire-in DCC decoders, and a bit of testing of same. After a few delays, most of what I was waiting for finally arrived, although a few things are still backordered. In particular, the six-pin NEM651-compatible plugs and sockets mentioned in the comments last time have arrived. For the curious, the parts list has been added to my page on DCC Decoders. Read More...
