Rapido RS-18

[Dave]

I have a RS-18 by Rapido I would like to to convert to Railpro.

However they made it so you have to remove the handrails, cab, and short and long hood to get at the insides.  A complicated process. 

Was wondering if anyone has opened one of these models up and determined if there is room for a Railpro decoder.  Rapido does have a video and there is not a lot of extra room from what I can see from the video.


David

[G8B4Life]

Having a look at the video (is this it? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnjkWS35Rvc) there is definitely sub-optimal room in there for an LM.


Click to make bigger

From what I can see in it's factory configuration there appears to be not enough length available, an LM may not fit between what appears to be part of the chassis on the right and the iPhone speaker on the left. If it does and you use an adapter harness to keep the motherboard then vertical space above the motherboard might be an issue.

The approximate available length could be worked out be from the video capture by using the length of the iPhone speaker and doing some math but the available height can't be measured from the capture and would need to be measured physically. I don't recall what I did with the couple of iPhone speakers I have so I can't get the measurements for you at the moment.

I don't envy this given it looks like a whole lot of wires but it looks to be a hardwire job disposing of the motherboard. If length is still an issue then perhaps the chassis protrusions on the right can be cut off, or the iPhone speaker can be made shorter (I've not had much success doing that but it is possible).

or, you can can send the screen capture to Ring and ask "are you working on that 21 pin LM, or do you expect me to use a harness here?" and see what response you get.

- Tim

[CPRail]

I did a Rapido SW1200RS, so if an LM can fit there, it can fit anywhere. I had to toss the board and hardwire the LM. I haven't been brave enough to re-open her up and figure out the lights.

You can cut down the iPhone speaker, or use a sugar cube.

See my post on it in RPUG. It took a while to get done, with lots of input on RPUG, but she works nice.

[emd_16645]

Plenty of space.  I have two on my workbench.  I pulled the factory speaker, and will reuse it in a cut down form as discussed elsewhere on the forum.  The big hold up for me at the moment is the ditch lights.  Rapido hooked up the class lights to Outputs 3 and 4 if you use a converter harness.  So I need an alternative means to get to the ditch lights.

[emd_16645]

A follow up to this.  After digging into my RS-18s further, I discovered that Rapido opted to wire the ditch lights to a sub-function rather than the 6 provided for on the 21 pin.  Frankly its a pretty stupid move on their part.  So these will require me to do a full rewire job, even if Ring ever were to release a 21-pin chip, it still wouldn't work.  I'm very disappointed with Rapido on these.