I recently added an Athearn quick connect DCC board in my P42 locomotive. The board came out of another engine where everything worked properly. I added a Digitrax DH-121 decoder to the board and the locomotive runs fine. However I am having problems with the headlights. There were two 1.5 volt lighbulbs in the previous engine that I broke when I was trying to remove them from the old shell since the previous owner of the engine had glued them in place. Therefore I replaced the bulbs with two brand new Miniatronics 1.5 volt, 15mA, 1.2mm bulbs. I twisted the two wires from each bulb and soldered them together. I then solderd each bulb lead to the two tabs on the front of the Athearn board. When I placed the loco on the layout it ran fine but I could not get the lights to come on by pressing the F0 key on the Digitrax DT100 throttle. I looked in my manuel and it said to reset CV29 to value 6 to fix this problem but nothing happened. Any help with this problem would be appreciated. UP3985
A couple of possibiliites –
Double check and make sure you didn’t twist both wires from the same bulb together before fastening them to the Athearn board.
Setting CV29 to a value of 06 is only for a 2-digit locomotive address and has nothing to do with the lights. If you are trying to use a 4-digit locomotive address, CV29 should be set to a value of 32 if you don’t want to run the engine on both DCC and DC, or 36 if you do.
CVs 49 and 50 control the lighting FX, with a value of 00 being for directional lighting.
The light output from the decoder is considerably more than 1.5 volts. If the decoder voltage is applied directly to the bulbs, they went “poof” the first time the light came on.
Does the light output from the decoder go into the “light board” on the engine, or are the blue, white and yellow wires connected directly to the bulbs?
Thats what I have done. How is the correct way to wire the lights to the board?