Cruise Commander help

Do they have a resistor in line already?  Normally they do if it was a former TMCC loco.  You do need a resistor, but it may be there. G

Single LED 470 ohm if it’s not there

This is from 1990.  Its not TMCC.  It has a QSI board for the EUnit, and a second board, which I believe is for the lighting.  If there are resistors for the LEDs, I would assume they are on the boards and not inline with the wiring.  I plan to gut the unit and remove both boards.  It only has 2 can motors, headlights and 2 lights for the main cabin area.  Only other strange thing I found so far is that the can motors have three wires.  One wire for each brush, and one that looks like its soldered to the can itself. (Yellow & Blue to brushes, and green to can).  I know this is all original, as I bought this new from a dealer back when it was released.  I have to check it with my meter but I am suspecting the green is a ground wire.  Just odd that they ran a ground wire from the outer shell of the can motor.

The Cruise Commander has the required load capacitor to connect LED's without a load resistor.  The Cruise Commander Lite does not have the load capacitor, so you add a .01uf 50V cap that is provided with the CC-Lite across the lighting outputs.

You will also need a series resistor if you're connecting bare LED's to the lighting outputs, the 470 mentioned is the right value.  I also add a diode in series to prevent damage due to reverse voltage, conventional mode lights get full-wave AC.

Finally, TMCC (other than the aforementioned Cruise Commander and other ERR TMCC products), will require the .01uf load resistor to force the triacs to fire with LED lighting.

I have a odd thing going on with led lighting.  I installed the forward reverse and strobe LED with a 470 ohm resistor connected to the lighting outputs of my AC Commander, with the R4LC code 08 board the lights work fine,  I got two new back up R2LC code 08 boards from Lionel, but they don't light the LED's, but will light regular lights.  Anybody got a guess to what is going on or what I have to do?????

Marty

Well, if you check, you'll see I mentioned the .01uf 50V capacitor across the lighting outputs to light LED's.  That's required unless you have one of the boards that include them.  If you're testing the R2LC-08 boards in the same AC Commander, I don't know what's happening as that is one of the boards that includes the capacitors.

John, you mentioned that I should also add a diode as well, in line to the LEDs.  Does it make a difference on which side of the LED, I wire in the diode?  And what value diode should I add?

Thanks

Anywhere in series is fine, either side of the LED.  The diode is to protect the LED in conventional mode, the light output is full wave AC track power in conventional.  Obviously, the polarity of the LED has to be considered, the cathode (banded end) points toward the lighting output in the circuit.