Puff&Chuff and smoke unit question

I may be wrong, but after looking at the diagram, I think that you need to plug the fan into the pcb socket on the smoke unit, then run the three wires as described in the diagram. The smoke element ground is probably achieved through the casing being connected to the chassis.

That makes sense.  

Thank you Nicole!

Nicole is correct, the ground wire is the smoke unit itself.

Well I wired to test and the smoke unit works very good but the fan spun when track power was applied but does not puff. When I removed power the regulator on the p&c was hot to the touch after only a few minutes. I will mod an old pc heatsink to it but only after I got the bugs worked out........ 

I wonder if the fan leads are reversed the fan would just run in reverse, right?

What would make it not puff?

Even in reverse, the smoke unit will put out smoke, at least I've seen that work on one that I had wired backwards.

Don't know why that would get hot, the fan doesn't take that much power.  The regulator is dropping the power from the track voltage to the 5V required for the fan, maybe that's a bit much?

They only use a half-wave rectifier and a TO220 LM7805 for power, so I'd think it wouldn't overheat that too much.

 What's all that stuff wrapped around the smoke unit?

Hey John,

That's a paper cup temporarily propping up the the smoke unit, because the unit getting mounted in the boiler, just to test.

Bob

    The two red wires on the smoke unit  three pin connector can be tied together and plugged in the cruise commander or you can remove one red wire. The black wire is the AC ground (outside rail) that can be attached to the engine frame. The two fan wires goto the chuffer board.

Bill

Bill,

So the fan bypasses the smoke unit board?

Thank you for you help!

Yes, plug the fan motor into the chuff board.

Bill

Bill,

Its working! Puff and all!!

Thanks!

You mean, just like the schematic posted in the first message?

I'm confused now, and I'm very sorry if I gave bad advice.  Isn't the smoke unit pcb wired so that one red and the black go to the fan socket, and the other red goes to the smoke unit and then grounds through the chassis?

The smoke unit fan is plugged into the smoke unit board.  To use the Puff-n-Chuff board, you just unplug the smoke unit from the smoke unit and plug it into the Puff-n-Chuff.  The power to the smoke unit board and the smoke resistor are not changed from a standard Cruise Commander (or AC/DC Commander) installation.

Yea, no worries, thank you for you help John and Nicole.

Now I'm off to mount the smoke unit, wire the last of the lights, and reassemble!

  When I am finished I will post video of my puffing and chuffing PRR Q2!

Did you add magnets to make it 4 chuff/rev?

John, I got three magnets on at the moment that give me about four chuff per although I think to be prototypical it need eight. As for magnets on the wheel I think its maxed out, as it is now wherever it stops its on the mag, in a way makes it A little more realistic.

Eight?  What are you putting this into?

I'm going to be putting this board and the Cruise Commander/RailSounds Commander in my GS4 Daylight, I'm still thinking on how to trigger the chuffs.  I was actually looking at not using magnets at all, but counting revs of the flywheel and using that to trigger them.

Well here it is, after a good amount of wiring its back together.

AUX2