RailPro > RailPro Specific Help & Discussion

Lights causing LM-3S to overheat?

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G8B4Life:
Hmm, a bit odd, they are Athearn globes and plugged into an Athearn board that is designed for them yet you are getting overtemp warnings from the setup. Looking around I can't find any really good pics of the motherboard but I'm guessing it's the 9 pin version (like this: https://drupal.tcsdcc.com/installation/ho-scale/1075) and not the 21 pin version.

Aside from checking your connections to make sure you've not got anything touching where it shouldn't be (stray stands etc) the only thing I can think of right now is maybe you shouldn't be using 2 globes per output with that motherboard. Perhaps a photo of the board and what you've done will help.

- Tim

CPRail:
Ask and you shall receive Tim!

According to the Athearn Parts List, the P/N for the board is 90616. I've attached a photo of the board as provided by Athearn. Based on the install photos, I'm 99% sure that I cut off the 8 pin plug receptacle.

The loco as originally supplied by Athearn would've had all 4 front light bulbs connected to the front H/L connections and two bulbs connected to the rear H/L connections.

Hopefully the photos show what you are looking for. Let me know if you need any other photos.

G8B4Life:
Well I can't see anything obvious, and checking other DCC installs Athearn does plug two globes into an output so that shouldn't be a problem.  The one thing I can see that could be an issue is check that the blue wire from the Keep Alive doesn't touch the white wire where you've soldered the Keep Alive to the board, if that happened it'd definitely cause an issue when you turned the lights on. Other than checking all your work again extra carefully I'm pretty much at a loss based on what I can see.

Oh, and the board you posted is different to what is in your model, but I don't think it makes a difference.

- Tim

gregeusa:
so there has been no measurement of the current drawn
no one has figured out if there are dropping/limiting resistors
but changing to LEDs solved the issue for others.

it seems that figuring that out would help solve the mystery.

My question was if the RP decoder can set brightness by doing PWM on the headlight "outputs"...

you could also measure the voltage across the bulbs during the short time the system "works"

Greg

JRad:
Greg, you asked "My question was if the RP decoder can set brightness by doing PWM on the headlight "outputs"...
"

The answer is yes. Each light output has a brightness adjustment that uses PWM to reduce the current.

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