I've purchased several ERR cruise commanders and steam railsounds kits to upgrade steam locos without command or sound. The Railsounds instructions seem to me to steer you to a magnet on a tender wheel to drive steam chuff. Some of my locos have smoke units. One has a flywheel with black and white bands. Wondering what my options are for steam chuff input, and what others have done?
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have used both serial data chuff and direct to railsounds lite board hall effect or reed switch encoder.
by data- I mean on the R2LC receiver in the engine, there is a chuff input signal that can be connected to a frame common pulsed input (cam driven switch or other).
With a striped flwyeheel- you could use the @gunrunnerjohn's chuff generator board and generate that programmed chuff signal and then with a tether to the tender for serial data- the ERR railsounds will accept serial data chuff from the engine.
This is covered in the manual https://www.3rdrail.com/err-3r...lSoundsCmdr-Inst.pdf
The ERR Cruise commander shows this Chuff input connection
Needless to say, I use the Chuff-Generator for any install I do. I get a true 4-chuffs/rev that way, the magnet and reed switch won't give you that.
So for a loco with no flywheel (and hence tach tape), what are my options? Reed switch near a driver with 4 magnets? What else?
Well, does the locomotive had an existing chuff switch? What is the exact make/model we're talking about?
I have a Williams USRA 4-6-2 and an MTH USRA 2-8-2. The original PS-2 sound in the MTH loco got fried; it currently has a Dallee electronic e-unit only.
How is it the MTH USRA 2-8-2 doesn't have a flywheel?
From the description of the PS/2 2-8-2...
Precision Pittman Flywheel Equipped Motor
It guess it does. I haven't had that apart in a while. I wonder if it already has the ability to send a chuff signal to the cruise commander?
The Williams loco has a seuthe smoke unit with no chuff and no flywheel.
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