Directional Lighting upgrade issue

[leer76]

Hi all, I have a problem with a lighting upgrade i have installed on an old class 43, the red tail lights remain on constantly, so as soon as power is applied to the track they come on whether its being used or not, the things i have done and tried are as follows:

I replaced the ringfield motor for a 12v can motor and then hardwired a TTS decoder all of which worked absolutley fine when tested, i then added a directional lighting board to the decoder, blue to power, (0v) white to forward and yellow to reverse, when loco moves forward white comes on but red stays on, when loco moves in reverse white goes out and red remain on, switching F0 will turn white on and off but red remains on constantly although does get a little brighter when F0 is on. I can not see any short circuits on the wiring and i have applied values 2, 6 and 38 into CV29 but all with no effect, speed steps is set to 128, the manufacturer says that the decoder controls the lights so if it is not a short circuit then its a CV issue or faulty decoder but i cant see the decoder being the problem as everything else works fine.

Has anyone else had this issue or does anyone know of a fix that i have not tried?

[Chrissaf]

...I then added a directional lighting board.

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Which one....made by whom.....model or part number?

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...when loco moves forward white comes on but red stays on, when loco moves in reverse white goes out and red remain on, switching F0 will turn white on and off but red remains on constantly although does get a little brighter when F0 is on

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Please be more specific....use terms like "Front White" "Rear White" "Front Red" "Rear Red" etc.

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Very unlikely to be a CV issue....more likely how you have implemented this lighting board, particularly if it is a non Hornby third party product.

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Please confirm whether lights are LEDs or Bulbs. Particularly the Red ones.

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TIP: As a newbie poster on the forum, just be aware that the 'Blue Button with the White Arrow' is not a 'Reply to this post' button. If you want to reply to any of the posts, scroll down and write your reply in the reply text box at the bottom of the page and click the Green 'Reply' button.

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See also – further TIPs on how to get the best user experience from this forum.

https://www.hornby.com/uk-en/forum/tips-on-using-the-forum/

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[96RAF]

When you upgraded the lighting presumbly you removed all of the original lighting including the diodes used in the DC to control the directional aspect.

 

As Chris says unlikely to be CVs as TTS decoders have no CVs that can be changed associated with lighting.

[leer76]

Hi all

Apologies, front white and rear reds and they are led's as opposed to bulbs.The board was from a company called black cat technology and i bought them in a pair, although i am yet to fit the second one to the dummy car. I have tried both boards and I get the same problem and i did remove the diode when i hardwired the decoder as per instructions below

https://blackcattechnologyblog.files.wordpress.com/2017/10/hst-lights-instructions-single-page-v5.pdf

[Fishmanoz]

Given red is on all the time incl when directional lighting switched off, it must be getting volts from somewhere other than the CV controlled white function wire coming from the decoder.  If that is the case, unlikely for us to be able to find it even with photos of the board.  That could be from a green or purple function wire (in which case you could switch it off via that function) or via the -ve side of the bridge rectifier (In which case nothing can switch it off).

[Chrissaf]

The reason I asked about 'Front' vs 'Rear' lights...is I assumed in absence of anything to the contrary in your post that you had full directional lighting with both White and Red lights at both ends of the loco.

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In full directional lighting, when the 'Front White' lights are on, the 'Rear Red' ones are optionally on as well. And when the 'Rear White' are on, the 'Front Red' are optionally on.

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OK now that you have stated it is an HST I have a better understanding. Despite the inference in your first post, the Red 'Tail' lights are NOT actually on the rear of the loco they are on the front of the loco. Thus they are the tail lights of the TRAIN (not the loco) when going in reverse.

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So the White lights AND the Red lights are on the same end (nose) of the HST motor car. This now starts to make sense.

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Therefore I take it that sequence you want to achieve is thus:

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When the motor car is going forward (TRAIN forward) the White nose cone lights are on, and Red off.

When the motor car is going backward (TRAIN in reverse) the Red nose cone lights are on, and White off.

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Your Red lights 'always on' issue could be a wiring error on your part in installing the 'Black Cat' board. But the instructions do seem very clear about where to attach the 'Blue', 'White' and 'Yellow' wires to their PCB.

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The instructions do however state that if you have any issues, that you should contact 'Black Cat' in the first instance. I daresay, that if you replicate your observed symptoms to them, they will be able to instantly pin point what you are likely to have done wrong.

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Their instructions do not include a wiring diagram, so they are difficult to interpret without having the actual PCB lighting board in front of us to diagnose with a multimeter.......and this is the type of activity (multimeter testing) that would be required to diagnose what is going wrong. Hence why you should contact 'Black cat' first. This is not the first 'Black Cat' lighting board to be mentioned with installation issues on this forum.

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If you do have access to a 'Multimeter', put it on DC Voltage range 0-20 volts. Put the red meter probe on the decoder blue wire. With the decoder commanded to travel forward (ie normally the white lights on and the red off). Put the black meter probe on the decoder yellow wire, any reading you get should be very minimal..... far less than 1 volt. If it is more than about 5 volts or so, then that is wrong and would account for why the red lights are still on. If you do get this higher reading. Then you will have to do the test again with the decoder yellow wire disconnected from the 'Black Cat' board to see if the yellow wire still has this higher negative voltage on it when not connected. This is something that would be easier to do with a 'rolling road', but you should still be able to take these measurements with the loco on the normal DCC track as long as the speed is set to zero (loco stationary). In fact, with the decoder yellow wire disconnected, do the red LEDs go out?

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To be honest, with a DCC decoder you can implement a very simple White and Red LED lights solution with 2 x White LEDs plus 2 x Red LEDs plus 4 x 1,000 ohm resistors. The 'Black Cat' lighting board just over-complicates things, because it is allowing 'proto-typical' operation options to be implemented.

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The instructions make some comment about the plastic lens sharing red and white lights (see image below yellow highlight). Could it be that your always on 'Red Light' is some form of light bleed coming from the white LEDs (I'm assuming some form of red lens in the plastic moulding as I really am not familiar with this particular model). Note the text in the green highlight.

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In Conclusion.

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However, that all said. My gut feeling is that you haven't fully isolated the original locomotive light wiring from your replacement lighting circuit board. But without a full pictorial detailed record of what you have actually done 'step by step' to modify the model, it is too difficult for us (and me) to advise further. This comment is not too dissimilar to the comment that Fishy has posted in his reply above mine.

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[96RAF]

I seem to remember something from the black kat instructions about spot drilling the pcb to enable certain functionality. I don’t know if I kept those instructions or not nor if the rework was applicable to enable DC or DCC options.

 

To isolate red and white, especially if using lighthouse leds one technique I have used is to slip a suitably sized bit of shrink tube over the led ‘post‘ to join it to the loco lens part.

[Chrissaf]

There is a reference to drilling the PCB in the instructions linked to in Leer's second post on the thread page.

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It appears to be an optional thing you can do if you want individual control over the front white lights to operate a single white light prototypically.

[leer76]

Good evening gents

I should have made it much clearer. Yes, the problems occur on the one board as i am yet to fit the other decoder and board to the dummy car and they have not been fitted into the front lens as yet.  When i installed it and tested it for the first time i was expecting the white leds to come on going forward and then i was expecting them to go out and change to red when i put the loco in reverse however, as per earlier post that did not happen. At this point i checked the wiring for shorts as i too expected the problem to be a permenant live but found nothing, i then contacted black cat as i believed it was a faulty board but it was them who told me the lights were controlled by the decoder so it could not be a faulty board only a CV issue or wiring to 0v. As i got a pair of boards i tried the other one but with the same result.

About a year ago i did buy a set of bi-colour leds (red/white) with resistors for this task but alas nowhere to be found so it was then that i purchased the black cat board

I have a multimeter but one thing i was not sure of was what to actually check so thanks Chrissaf for the advice, i will come back with my findings

I 

Stay safe everyone