Good Afternoon All:

The saga continues:

I am doing a hard wire conversion of an ihc mehano 2-8-2 Mikado steam loco. 

The decoder is an LM-2S

From the nine pin wiring harness, I am using the red to the right side pick up, black to the left side pick up, orange to the positive motor, grey to the negative motor and blue and white for the front light.

Before installing everything, I did a motor test with the above connections soldered appropriately, with the exception of hooking up the front light.

I put the engine, without tender, on the test track. Hit find product; product found LM-2S.  Exit page.

Hit locomotives, hit no name engine, screen displays “button setup changed. Go to adjustments.”  Exit.

Hit adjustments, hit save, save complete, hit next page x2, hit motor full load current, use auto set yes, hit start test, count down, momentary display of 100% then showing 0mA, redo start test, loco speed 100% then error-timeout, try a third time, error time out.  The first two times the motor made a sound then stopped, the third time, no motor sound.

Thinking I had a short in the wiring harness, I got a new nine pin wiring harness and soldered directly to the terminals.  Same results.

Thinking maybe a bad decoder, I tried a brand new LM-3S.  Same results.

I put another dcc engine on the track.  Everything ran fine.

Thinking the motor was bad on my Mikado,  I hooked the motor leads to my dc power pack.  It ran just fine.  This motor is not the original motor.  The old three pole was shot so I replaced it with a new five pole.

What am I doing wrong?  Help.

Kind regards,

Max

exactly, agree, over the drawbar

Good Evening All:

Per my previous post on running wires to the tender pickups, the lm-2S will be mounted in the tender. The nine wires coming out of the chip have a six pin male jst
Micro connector on the other end and a hole will be cut in the front of the tender to glue the jst micro connector in place.  This will allow me to separate tender from steam locomotive by attaching a female jst micro connector to the wires coming out of the locomotive.

Now the question:
Where to place the micro connector coming out of the tender.
The locomotive and tender have no wires running between them. 
I have two places to cut on the tender.  The first choice is right over the draw bar connecting tender to locomotive.  This allows for running three wires through the right side of the cab and three wires to the left side of the cab.  No wires would cross over the motor or moving parts.

The second choice is in the bottom left corner of the tender, running wires through the bottom left of the cab. Three wires would then run down the left side of the motor and three wires would come up and over the motor and down the right side of the motor.

Cab detail on this loco is non-existent as there is a lead weight at the back interior of the cab followed by the motor.  All discreetly hidden behind the rear cab wall of the loco.

Which would you choose and why. 

Kind regards,
OCD Max

More pickups will lessen the chance of engine stalling due to dirty wheels and track or on switches.

The instructions were clear enough for me to work through. If you need help, I would volunteer.
Bryan

Quote from: gregeusa on May 21, 2025, 01:03:07 PM

Another option is to buy a cheap laptop, can be had for $200 new (just bought an Asus L210)
...
It's not the end of the world to learn enough of windows to just run a program... then you have the approved platform if you have issues.

Buying another piece of hardware to use it for just that one purpose is not the way forward and just compounds the problem.

Anyway, you don't have to use Windows to run RPA and HC Sim, though it is of course much simpler. 5 years ago I demonstrated getting both RPA and HC Sim working on Linux with Wine. Yes the journey to make it work was definitely not in the realm of everyday users but it was possible and one user successfully followed my instructions and got it going themselves. Wine is also available for macOS 10.15.4 and later. On the virtual machine front I also at one time had RPA and HC Sim working on ReactOS (basically a free opensource clone of Windows). This would likely still work with a compatibility version patch to RPA and HC Sim.

- Tim