Lighting control

[AMJ]

There are various DCC controlled locos in the USA that have class lights that you can change the colour of by cycling around by pressing a Fn button a few times, most of these have off, white, green, off as the cycle.

 

Just wonder if anyone has considered an electronic board to control the lighting on UK locos.

 

We have a few suitable candidates

 

Current lighting standards where you have day and night operations.  I realise that some use many outputs from the decoder to perform the same but if you could press F0 to cycle from off, day, off, night, off

 

Green era locos with disc head code lights or certain late steam locos fitted with electric lights.  There are 9 different classes of lighting codes (excluding the all on for royal train workings) 

 

I'm sure that if someone did a small board with the right solder pads for these that there would be quite a lot of folks interested in adding lighting

 

Why use a stack of outputs from a chip to just control lights that could all be controlled on one cycled function?

[Pete the Elaner]

Are you sure they do this? I can't think of any function which is not simply off or on & this is how my handset (a Powercab) operates too, so I suspect on/off for a function is defined within the NMRA standards.

I have known a change in CV to alter what the function does. For example, a CV change in my Hattons 66 allows me to choose one of  different horns, but hitting function 2 or 3 plays the currently selected one.

[Nigelcliffe]

Like Pete, would like a direct reference to the circuits.   I think the control is feasible, but will it actually save wiring ?  You still need to bring the different LEDs back to an output on the hypothetical new circuit. 

 

I know of decoders which can be setup to have "modes" of operation.  So there might be a key for "lights on/off" and another key for "day/night".   But they're still wired as one-wire per LED.  (Exception might be if its just "brightness" or "flashing cycle"). 

 

 

[Tricky Dicky]

A simple PIC could be used to monitor the number of changes of state on one input and produce the appropriate outputs even flashing lights.

 

Richard