Anyone using BCR's with LED Strip Passenger Car Lighting?

I suspect that if one fed 3 or 4 VDC to LEDs, a 2.5F supercap would eliminate flickering.  If one uses those strip lights at 12VDC, it would require a bit more throught.  After all, one keeps my DCS locos' lights lit for a few seconds.  The Digikey 2.5s would fit in a passenger car with no problem at all. 

Anyone using BCR's with LED Strip Passenger Car Lighting?

yes, Lionel, in their 21" pass cars.

Actually isn't anyone who puts a cap in the circuit with them?

If you do the math (Stored Energy = 1/2 * Capacitance * Volts * Volts), a 2.5F supercap charged up to 5V could power a typical passenger car LED strip burning about 1/4 Watt for over 100 seconds.  Such a supercap stores several hundred times more energy than a 470uF "normal" cap charged up to ~20V at command-control track voltage.  But you don't need seconds of backup lighting for flicker reduction.  You only need a fraction of a second which is why the 470uF works fine.  After all, if you've got dirty track or whatever causing intermittent loss of track power for anywhere near a second, you've gone bigger fish to fry...like your engine will stall!

If the question is about replacing the 470uF with a supercap, note that the supercaps under discussion are typically limited to 5V operation.  The capacitor used on the Hennings LED board operates at 20V or more.  And the 12V LED strips that mate with the Hennings board need at least ~10V to operate.  So to take advantage of supercap technology you'd need 2 things, 1) a method to limit the supercap voltage to 5V, and 2) a method to boost the voltage to a suitable operating voltage for 12V LED strips.  These can all be done with some combination of the proverbial $1 (free shipping from Asia) eBay modules.  

But for the matter at hand (flicker reduction), if the 470uF cap proves inadequate, I'd simply add another 470uF (35V) capacitor.  And, as stated earlier, if even ~1000uF proves inadequate I'd call your MOW department for track maintenance, wheel/roller cleaning, etc.

The caps on my board are 35V, and the peak DC voltage measured at around 18 VAC on the power input is around 25 VDC.

If you really want to use a Supercap to do lighting strips, consider the 12V strips and also removing the series resistor on each LED on the strip to increase efficiency.  Finally, to squeeze the maximum amount of time out of the supercap, you could consider the design I used for the YLB, a linear supply to charge from track power to 5V on the supercap, and then a switching boost supply to bump the voltage up to what is needed to power the LED strip.

A simpler method would be to use a track powered 10V supply to charge two supercaps in series to drive the 12V strips.  Add a low value pot in series with the power to the strip for intensity control.

Thanks John and Stan. Good info. I figured a Supercap would be overkill but thought I would ask anyhow. If I was going to do this I would likely order some 5 vdc LED strip lighting so I could use a 5.5 vdc Supercap directly and not have to worry about boosting the cap supply up to 12 vdc. Not knowing yet just how well a 470 or 1000 uF capacitor will address flicker minimization, is kind of what initiated the question. Hopefully it will all work fine.

Rod

Rod, I still use 330uf on my lighting module, and I've never had any issues with flicker.  As long as your not going over major unpowered sections, you should never see any.  A 470uf cap will obviously do even better, I think you're trying to find a solution to a nonexistent problem.

Lionel used supercaps in some of their latest passenger cars, they stay lit for a minute or more.  What's the sense in that?  That seems to be hopeless overkill.  Of course, in some of the MTH LED lit cars, they didn't bother to add a cap at all, the other end of the spectrum!

John I agree with you on all counts! 

Rod