Since I'm more familiar with black and red, I wanted to double check my work before I blew out the TSunami. It's in their Blueline Light Mike, is their Black still positive and someone just had a grudge against red wire? Or is it backwards to my normal familiarity?
-Morgan
Are you talking BLI Blueline here? They already have a sound decoder in it. All you need is an inexpensive motor decoder to run it on DCC.
Pete
I pray every day I break even, Cause I can really use the money!
I started with nothing and still have most of it left!
locoi1sa Are you talking BLI Blueline here? They already have a sound decoder in it. All you need is an inexpensive motor decoder to run it on DCC. Pete
I've ended up updating the engine to her modern tender, which is metal (I'm pretty sure it shorted the motor control Digitrax it had when I put it in, though I can't figure out where the contact was made as I was liberal with both the liquid and solid forms of electrical tape), has two posts to mount the trucks to, no room fo rher old decoder, and the decoder''s whistle isn't proper anyway. So it's going back to it;s old tender, and the new Tsunami is going into the engine. No more metal tender problems. Hee. My original plan was to use the old decoder stuff straight-transferred to the new tender, but it just wasn't working out. If I could've found a better representation of an NKP 22-RA, but it didn't happen.
If I understand right you gutted the original decoder from a Blueline and are installing a Tsunami. In that case you should trace all wiring out and hook them up based on the Tsunami wiring chart. If the decoder was in the tender I'd leave it there since that's where the Speaker is. All that should transfer to the Loco should be power pick up, headlight, and motor.
Springfield PA
HamltnblueIn that case you should trace all wiring out and hook them up based on the Tsunami wiring chart
That's what I'm trying to do, though in the engine, not the tender. But the Blueline uses black and grey wires. not the usual black and red, and I resally don't want to find out the hard way that I hooked up the positivies to the negatives because BLI did their colors differently. and the BLI tender wires are all black, not the NMRA colors, so I really can't do that anyway.
Hamltnblue If the decoder was in the tender I'd leave it there since that's where the Speaker is.
The tender space is not condusive to their decoder board, I tried. So it's going in the engine. There's room, I just need to wire things up. The new speaker, though smaller, will be going behind the firebox grate, and probably down toward the trailing truck.
So again, all I really want to make sure of in that the blacks are still postive feeds, and the grey is the new red.
reversing the polarity shouldn't hurt anything. If it's the motor it will run backwards, if it's the LED it won't light. Make sure however you use resistors with the LED's
Also if you look at the tsunami AT1000 manual you'll see that they use gray.
I beleive that the colors you see in the install guide are DCC standard.
Here's a link. Look at page 8 in the guide.
http://www.soundtraxx.com/manuals/tsuinstallation.pdf
Edit: I read in a couple of links that there is an NMRA standard for wire colors.
http://www.euram-online.co.uk/dcc/decoders/decoders.htm
Hamltnblue Edit: I read in a couple of links that there is an NMRA standard for wire colors. http://www.euram-online.co.uk/dcc/decoders/decoders.htm
Knew there was somewhere. What about rail-pickup though, is that affected if reversed? Cause they are grey and black as well. I wouldn't think so, as long as one comes from one rail and the other goes to the other.
Shouldn't matter but I'd be consistent. The links above indicate the color for right and left pickup.
I bought a refurbished HO BLI F7 A/B set, DCC only, no decoders.
The below photo is out of the box for DC testing. Not a big deal.
Rich
If you ever fall over in public, pick yourself up and say “sorry it’s been a while since I inhabited a body.” And just walk away.
I take it the grey crosses over the black as it dips down behind the cab area at the front, just like it does in the back - since both greys are tied together. It owuld seem grey is the new red in BLI speak - perhaps someone there is colorblind? Still, at least they used two different colors, some locos have all black for the track pickups!
Reversing the input to the decoder will cause no harm, but it does pay to be consistent. Naturally you can't cross the truck pickups or the loco will cause a dead short as soon as it's on the rails. The only time the loco's direction will be flipped is if you flip the motor leads, on the decoder they would be orange and grey, on the BLI loco it looks like orange would go to grey and grey to black.
--Randy
Modeling the Reading Railroad in the 1950's
Visit my web site at www.readingeastpenn.com for construction updates, DCC Info, and more.
FlashwaveSince I'm more familiar with black and red, I wanted to double check my work before I blew out the TSunami. It's in their Blueline Light Mike, is their Black still positive and someone just had a grudge against red wire? Or is it backwards to my normal familiarity?
Breakout your VOM and do a continuity check. Very simple. I do that with all DCC installs. If you work at this level in DCC, you should have a VOM.
The main problem is that there are standard wire color codes defined by the NMRA for decoder wires, but there are no standards for locomotive manufacturers to follow in their wiring, so you never know what you're likely to encounter even with two models from the same company..
Bachmann even told me point blank that they didn't have any idea what color wire went where in their G-scale 2-truck Shay because the factory in China apparently just used whatever color wire they had on hand and no schematic had been provided to them.
Bottom line is you should always test. There are evil Chinese workers out to get you and might switch the colors.