Modifications to Easy Peasy Passenger Car Lighting

[mmagliaro]

I have given up on the Easy Peasy lights.   The magic wand just doesn't seem to work that well. On some Kato cars it works fine. On the MT heavyweight cars it is a random event.

No idea it it is the thickness of the shells or what.   Your experience may vary. To me, they have not proven to be worth the cost. 


I do congratulate Rapido, however.  I broke the reed switch while trying to fit one into a MT car and they gave me a free replacement board and a couple of batteries to boot.  Thanks guys. !

Now that's one aspect of the Easy Peasy lights that I have never had trouble with, but then, I've only installed a few of these.  They always seem to trigger just fine.   That magic wand is just a magnet on the end of a stick.   Have you tried just buying a strong, larger, ceramic magnet and seeing if that works better for you?

[OldEastRR]

[wm3798]

I like lighting the layout for night time ops, but interior coach lighting has always been an issue.  I partly solved the problem by modeling the WM in the 70s, so no passenger service to speak of...  But in general principle, I'd prefer lighting to be less intense, and more even.  Are you working on ways to solve those problems?

[mmagliaro]

My lighting (and any Easy Peasy lighting) can be made less intense by wiring in the resistor I showed in my original series of photos.
You can choose any value you like and it can easily cut down the brightness even on the stock boards.

As for spreading the light more evenly, here's what I observe.  In the actual Rapido cars, only one of which I own (which I admit isn't much of a statistical sample), the light looks wonderfully even.  I think that's because they designed their cars so the clear plastic window "glass"
sides carry the light down from their Easy Peasy board light channels and spread it.  In any other car, the "hot spots" are more
of an issue.

I improved this a lot by wrapping the LEDs in aluminum foil, so that light can only come out of the tip that points into the plastic light channel
carrier.  Be careful not to short the LED leads.   It also helps a lot if you paint the backside of the LED with dark black paint or wrap a bit of electrical tape around there.  You want all the light to come out of the tip of the LED as much as possible.  It's not perfect, but it's
an improvement.

Also, I have a somewhat disheartening correction to make.   I was measuring the current on the board at the wrong place (probably in
the base-current driver to the transistor switch that drives the LEDs).   Now, measuring it correctly, the current draw on the stock board
is not 1.6mA.  It is about 6 mA. 

That makes more sense, as I thought 1.6 awfully low to power even an LED.

All of my research about relative  battery life is correct, but the total hours are off, probably by a factor of 3 or 4.
So that means that the stock LR41 Rapido batteries should only hold up for about 4-5 hours of run time, not 20.  (That's pretty awful).
The SR41's  should last about 44/6, or about 7 hrs.
And the larger SR45's, about  68/6, or about 10 hrs.

The alternate batteries are still a big improvement, but 10 hrs is a lot less satisfying than 40 or 60.

I will know for sure in a day or so.  I am testing the board with each type of battery and I will report the results.
(If you wire in the resistor, you can get the current draw down and increase battery life.  I will report the improvement I get from that
too).

[bbussey]

It wouldn't be worthwhile to wire it off the track power with a capacitor thrown in to eliminate potential flickering, especially on DCC layouts where the current is constant?

I'm not too keen about popping the roofs every 10 hours of operation to change the battery.  No N scale passenger car model is designed to be assembled/disassembled on a regular basis.  At some point, the roof latches are going to fail.

[mmagliaro]

It wouldn't be worthwhile to wire it off the track power with a capacitor thrown in to eliminate potential flickering, especially on DCC layouts where the current is constant?

I'm not too keen about popping the roofs every 10 hours of operation to change the battery.  No N scale passenger car model is designed to be assembled/disassembled on a regular basis.  At some point, the roof latches are going to fail.

Point well taken about the roof.  The Rapido roofs are very secure and light-proof.  But I wonder how long they
will hold up, not to mention Con-Cor, MTL and all the other brands that people use these light boards in.
However, I will say that I'm not sure what "fail" really means.  Unless the roof is warped, it should press in and just stay even if the latch nubs aren't firmly locking it down.

You would need to change the wheelsets and add wipers/pickups to pull power from the track.  And it's more complicated than just throwing a capacitor across there, because the capacitor by itself would be across not just your car LEDs, but across EVERYTHING connected to the track, including your DCC pulses.   

I have never actually worked this out and tested it, but it seems to me you would need some sort of (probably) high-impedance opamp driver to isolate the LED circuit and capacitor from the track.  You might be able to get away with just a diode to keep the capacitor from discharging back into the track, but I still don't know if having the cap across the rails like that would change the shape of the DCC pulses enough to screw up your command signals.   Folks who do DCC all the time would know better than me on that one.

You would also need some sort of voltage regulator in place, because people run their DCC voltages at a variety of levels,
so if this thing were general-purpose, it would have to limit the input to, say, 10, or 8, to make sure it would work no matter what the track voltage is.

[peteski]

I'm totally against having any sort of watch-battery powered lighting in my N scale cars.  Especially if each car needs 3 batteries. Considering the expense of the batteries and the inevitable possibility that some of the batteries will leak (either because they were defective, I forgot to turn the unit off, or because they were carelessly left in the car for an extended period of time), this type of a circuit is a big no-go for me! It is just way too much hassle to deal with, especially considering that more than ample power is already available from the track the car is on.  I'm talking about DCC of course. If I was inot DC, I would use rechargeable batteries.  Back in the early 90s (my pre-DCC days) I used a voltage regulator, NiCad battery and 1.5V micro bulbs for constant lighting.

But now, on DCC layout, I use Kato light boards modified with a capacitor and resistor to prevent flicker.  It works perfectly and no hassles of periodic maintenance, or a worry about the electrolyte leakage.

[bbussey]

... You would need to change the wheelsets and add wipers/pickups to pull power from the track.  And it's more complicated than just throwing a capacitor across there, because the capacitor by itself would be across not just your car LEDs, but across EVERYTHING connected to the track, including your DCC pulses.   

I have never actually worked this out and tested it, but it seems to me you would need some sort of (probably) high-impedance opamp driver to isolate the LED circuit and capacitor from the track.  You might be able to get away with just a diode to keep the capacitor from discharging back into the track, but I still don't know if having the cap across the rails like that would change the shape of the DCC pulses enough to screw up your command signals.   Folks who do DCC all the time would know better than me on that one.

You would also need some sort of voltage regulator in place, because people run their DCC voltages at a variety of levels,
so if this thing were general-purpose, it would have to limit the input to, say, 10, or 8, to make sure it would work no matter what the track voltage is.

Easy-peasy for someone who scratchbuilds and kitbashes steam engines as a method of relaxation. 

I'm totally against having any sort of watch-battery powered lighting in my N scale cars.  Especially if each car needs 3 batteries. Considering the expense of the batteries and the inevitable possibility that some of the batteries will leak (either because they were defective, I forgot to turn the unit off, or because they were carelessly left in the car for an extended period of time), this type of a circuit is a big no-go for me! It is just way too much hassle to deal with, especially considering that more than ample power is already available from the track the car is on.  I'm talking about DCC of course. If I was inot DC, I would use rechargeable batteries.  Back in the early 90s (my pre-DCC days) I used a voltage regulator, NiCad battery and 1.5V micro bulbs for constant lighting.

But now, on DCC layout, I use Kato light boards modified with a capacitor and resistor to prevent flicker.  It works perfectly and no hassles of periodic maintenance, or a worry about the electrolyte leakage.

Agreed.  It shouldn't be any more difficult to do than it was on DC in earlier days.  I remember 30 years ago at one of the conventions that someone had put marker light lanterns on his caboose with a reed switch under the roof, and a magnet underneath an overpass at the throat of his yard.  When the train left the yard, the marker lights turned on, and when returning the marker lights turned off.  He also had a capacitor in the circuitry to eliminate flickering, so the markers remained on for about a minute before fading out.  The marker lights were formed from tiny grain-of-wheat bulbs (no micro LEDs then) painted black, with tiny circles of paint removed from three of the sides and tinted red and greed appropriately.  I liked them so much I modified one of my kitbashed cabooses, but eventually removed them because I wasn't happy with the look of the crude metal wheels back then.

[mmagliaro]

Wow, these Easy Peasy boards are driving me nuts.
When I started a time test this morning, the board drew 6.5mA.

It has now run for 8 hours on the provided (LR41) batteries.  Since they were lasting far longer than they
should with those batteries at that load, I measured it again.  Now it is drawing only 0.95 mA !
The brightness is good.  If it's any dimmer, I sure can't tell.  The output voltage across the two cells
is about 2.55 (it was 2.85 when I started the test.

Crazy.  I have to figure out what's going on with the bizarre current draw behavior, or it will be impossible to
predict how long a battery type will really last, except by just running them until they drop.  Moreover, I find it
amazing that the current varies at all, and especially by that much.   Very strange.
Maybe they have some very sophisticated little circuit in there that does current limiting based on the output voltage
from the batteries.

[peteski]

Wow, these Easy Peasy boards are driving me nuts.
When I started a time test this morning, the board drew 6.5mA.

It has now run for 8 hours on the provided (LR41) batteries.  Since they were lasting far longer than they
should with those batteries at that load, I measured it again.  Now it is drawing only 0.95 mA !
The brightness is good.  If it's any dimmer, I sure can't tell.  The output voltage across the two cells
is about 2.55 (it was 2.85 when I started the test.

Crazy.  I have to figure out what's going on with the bizarre current draw behavior, or it will be impossible to
predict how long a battery type will really last, except by just running them until they drop.  Moreover, I find it
amazing that the current varies at all, and especially by that much.   Very strange.
Maybe they have some very sophisticated little circuit in there that does current limiting based on the output voltage
from the batteries.

While I have no idea about the actual circuit itself (I never owned one of these), I suspect that your very sophisticated circuit is simply the LEDs themselves.  If you look at any LED voltage vs. current graph you will see that it is not linear. Small change in voltage, around the LEDs forward voltage, results in large current swing.

[mmagliaro]

True, Peteski.  But the LEDs are lit and lit with good brightness the whole time.

EDIT --- This turned out to be a red herring.  I *thought* they had good brightness.  It was in a pretty
dimly lit garage.   Compared to a board with fresh batteries, the brightness was really dead.
--- END EDIT

 would have thought they were fully turned on and conducting and even now (down at 0.7 ma !)
they are still lighted well.  It doesn't make sense to me that I crossed over the conducting point.

[mmagliaro]

Upon comparing the board to another one with fresh batteries,  it's my bad here.
The light output has been fading quite significantly.   In fact, compared to fresh batteries, the one under test
is quite dead.

I have been monitoring the battery output voltage regularly.  At about 2.5 volts,
they are so dim you would have to change the batteries, and it hit that point after about 4.5 hours,
which is more like I figured.   Yes, the current draw is very low, but SO IS THE LIGHT OUTPUT.   Ha ha..  That makes a lot more
sense.

Whew.  I'm glad it was just my misperception. 

As soon as I get a fresh batch of SR41 and SR45, I'll make time tests, and the benchmark will be:
"How many hours does it run before the battery voltage drops below 2.6?"

[bbussey]

4½ hours isn't a lot of time.  That's a lot of roof-popping on the model to change batteries.

Also, plastic does "warp" slightly when it comes out of the mold.  It's part of the cooling process — some areas cool faster than others.  So in most cases, the roof will not sit flush on the car body without the tabs to hold it in place.  They wouldn't be included if they weren't necessary, as a press-fit design is much easier to tool and much easier to eject from the mold.

[mmagliaro]

4½ hours isn't a lot of time.  That's a lot of roof-popping on the model to change batteries.

Also, plastic does "warp" slightly when it comes out of the mold.  It's part of the cooling process — some areas cool faster than others.  So in most cases, the roof will not sit flush on the car body without the tabs to hold it in place.  They wouldn't be included if they weren't necessary, as a press-fit design is much easier to tool and much easier to eject from the mold.

I agree completely (about the 4-1/2 hrs).  That's one of the reasons I started this thread - research into a simple
way to give these cards longer battery life.    There are lots of track-power solutions.  The point is that these cards
are very convenient and they work well, but I wish they had longer life and different color lighting.

You are right that the car roofs won't sit flush without the tabs.   I suppose its a matter of how much
grab is really needed to keep them in, and how much they really wear.   So far, I've had the roof in and out
of the MTL car at least 20 times because it was my guinea pig for this project, and it still grabs tight.    I did a Con-Cor dome car 2 nights ago, and that also was in/out 20 times easily before I was done, and it clips in tightly too.
That's a lot of battery changes, especially if I get the battery life up.

[bbussey]

So we're talking voltage regulator, capacitor and two resistors to convert the unit to run off DCC, correct?  And all of those components can fit on the board where the batteries currently are.

Also, isn't Kato's lighting kit designed for DCC with evenly distributed lighting from golden white LEDs?  The Kato units easily can be adapted for other models.  MSRP is $10 for the Kato (in the six-pack) versus $9 for the EPs.  Seems that for $1 more ($0.70 more at the online sites), I don't have to worry about changing batteries frequently.  It's also easy to swap in Kato trucks on various passenger models, which simplifies the current pick-up.