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Dallee Electronics passenger-car and caboose lighting strip
This review has certainly piqued my interest in exploring this lighting product and I found it very interesting but could have contained more information.
One thing that would have been a great help is if there was some reference, or example as to how the strips are hooked up to a battery and even provide the type(s) of battery can be used and how many volts are required to light the strip.
Also, can these strips be daisy-chained for multiple strips for say a long passenger car rather than separating them?
If so, how and what would it take in the way of batteries etc to accomodate this?
Additionally, would these work if connected to existing lighting ON/OFF switches in say an Aristo-Craft caboose? Or is an additional / replacement switch needed?
Not all of us ‘out here’ in the garden RR world are electronically inclined and a couple of extra sentences of additionl info would have been a great help and made this a better review.
Thanks.
Hi Kevin,
Many thanks for the reply and explanation! When it comes to the electronic stuff, I am new at this stuff and my eyes glaze over pretty quickly as I imagine myself blowing bulbs and fuses. However, your reply has cleared things up for me nicely. You may want to consider some of these small electronic projects for your GR magazine articles…hint, hint 
I am going to order a couple of these strips and give them a try. Should be fun. I think I’ll use batteries, rather than go to the track power.
Regards,
Gary
Gary, thanks for the comments. We as authors often take certain things for granted, so it’s nice to get feedback to remind us to remember to include certain things. So, let me address your questions.
The LED strips operate pretty much from 4.5 to 35 volts DC, with 6 volts being the practical minimum for maximum brightness out of the LEDs. Once you start getting track voltages exceeding 24 volts, you begin to exceed the ratings for motors and other electronics, so you’ll probably never put 35 volts to this board.
As for hooking the lights up to a power source (track or battery) it’s very straightforward. There are two leads (grey and red) that plug into the board. These leads get hooked up to either the track power or the battery. Polarity doesn’t matter, but convention has red as positive. Again, any kind of battery will work. I used a 6-volt battery pack (four AA batteries in a Radio Shack battery clip) for my tests. I’m using a standard 9-volt battery in my caboose installation because the marker lamps are 12-volt incandescent bulbs and I had to balance the marker lamps with the LEDs inside. (I also painted over the LEDs with brown paint to warm them up to a soft glow of a kerosene lamp.)
You can hook multiple boards to one battery in the same car without trouble. I’d just do it by hooking both boards directly to the battery (hooking them in parallel), instead of “daisy chaining” one after the other. I mean you could daisy chain them (hook them in series–like a string of Christmas lights) but you’d need twice the voltage on your battery. You don’t gain anything by doing that.
As for hooking the lights up to the on-off switch of an existing caboose, you can easily do that. You’ll have to trace the wiring of the caboose to find out how the existing lights are wired, so you can splice in the Dallee board at the appropriate place. Also, you’ll need to check the voltage going to the lights. If the lights are LEDs, they
Gary, thanks for the comments. We as authors often take certain things for granted, so it’s nice to get feedback to remind us to remember to include certain things. So, let me address your questions.
The LED strips operate pretty much from 4.5 to 35 volts DC, with 6 volts being the practical minimum for maximum brightness out of the LEDs. Once you start getting track voltages exceeding 24 volts, you begin to exceed the ratings for motors and other electronics, so you’ll probably never put 35 volts to this board.
As for hooking the lights up to a power source (track or battery) it’s very straightforward. There are two leads (grey and red) that plug into the board. These leads get hooked up to either the track power or the battery. Polarity doesn’t matter, but convention has red as positive. Again, any kind of battery will work. I used a 6-volt battery pack (four AA batteries in a Radio Shack battery clip) for my tests. I’m using a standard 9-volt battery in my caboose installation because the marker lamps are 12-volt incandescent bulbs and I had to balance the marker lamps with the LEDs inside. (I also painted over the LEDs with brown paint to warm them up to a soft glow of a kerosene lamp.)
You can hook multiple boards to one battery in the same car without trouble. I’d just do it by hooking both boards directly to the battery (hooking them in parallel), instead of “daisy chaining” one after the other. I mean you could daisy chain them (hook them in series–like a string of Christmas lights) but you’d need twice the voltage on your battery. You don’t gain anything by doing that.
As for hooking the lights up to the on-off switch of an existing caboose, you can easily do that. You’ll have to trace the wiring of the caboose to find out how the existing lights are wired, so you can splice in the Dallee board at the appropriate place. Also, you’ll need to check the voltage going to the lights. If the lights are LEDs, they