Gyra-lights?

[CPRail]

I'm doing the quartet of SP GP40Xs with the full Espee lighting - yup, I love making my life difficult. This will be my first real foray into lighting with RP.

As I have a ton of spare Athearn mini-blubs, I'll be using those for the time being. From what I can see, each end of the loco has the 4 light bulbs all going to the same place on the board. Being an Espee fan, I know that the true headlights are in the nose (and bottom location on the rear) with the other set being the Gyra-lite.

Obviously, I need to split the connections so that I can get the Gyra-lite to operate independently from the headlight. The big question is what do I connect to where? You'd think that Athearn would've split the connections or something, but no.

Remember electrical gurus, I need small words for the brain to understand how to get this to work without the magic smoke coming out!

[Alan]

Is your question How to split the wiring of the Athearn headlight assembly - or - Which wires on the LM to use for headlight and Gyralite?

[CPRail]

Hi Alan,

Sorry about the confusion. That's what I get for trying to type the message out at work in between other tasks.

The question is which wires to use? Also, other than solder connections, do I need anything in line to avoid blowing the blubs, or does the LM take care of that?

I know my Dad has done some installs in Athearn locos using their board and the lights are okay, so I'm not sure if there's something special on the board that I need or not.

[Alan]

How many wires are there coming out of the front or rear headlight assembly - 2 or 4?

If only 2 then you will need to perform surgery on the headlight assembly to gain access to the individual wires for each lamp.

Once you can access the wires for each individual lamp the next step is to determine the lamp voltages. Place a 1.5V battery across a lamp's leads. Does the bulb light? If so, it is a 1.5V bulb. If it does not light then try a 6V battery and finally a 12V battery. Knowing the lamp voltage will allow you to decide if a resistor is necessary and, if so, what value resistor to use.

Connect the lamps to any output pins on the LM you wish. Use RPA to install the gyralite lighting function. Assign buttons to the lights by choosing the wire colors during lighting setup. Same process as used to install and assign sounds to buttons. Refer to pages 15 - 18 of the RPA manual.