That’s a neat but not dainty solution to afix the lamp.
It doesn’t matter what lead you put the resistor on, but you should pick on or the other to be consistant. I wonder how many resistors are manufactured in China? Probably most of them. You can trust the resistors but I don’t know what the Tyco puts out.
In the above referenced thread, it looks like Brent wired one resistor in series with the LED’s. I didn’t think you could do that without the downstream LED being much dimmer. I’ll leave that to the gurus.
Your wires look like decoder gauge wires. It never occured to me to crimp them. I would solder and use heat shrink tubing or liquid heat shrink.
Peter, thanks. I took a long look at the website, and the distribution board looks like a really awesome solution, really well thought out and inclusive of lots of options. I wish I’d bought that at the same time, as I think that is the way I’ll go. I had to smile, though. The photo of the wires and resistors all screwed down to a length of 2x4 was very easy for me to understand.
On this mock-up I did, I used one resistor for each LED. If you look closely you can see a little square resister where the wire from the light meets the beam. These are chip resisters and are perfect for our hobby.
Here you can see the chip resistor above each light. I used copper tape as a power bus, soldering the chip to that on one side and the wire to the chip and the other wire to the tape on the other. I bought copper tape in several widths from China for about $2.20ca a roll.
I ordered these step-down converters from China for $2.00ca each. I order ten at a time as they do fail.
I order my resistor chips from Digi-Key. I got my order from them in 19hrs to rural Canada.
I order lots of stuff from China as well and it takes eleven days to get here on average.
You can use those large resistors, generally, you can hide them somewhere out of sight. I ended up using one resistor for each light as I just ran into issues doing it any other way.
I used a 9/64 drillbit to install this and it screwed in nice and tight without my even using the nut.
That whole discussion is above my pay grade. The phrase “wired one resistor in series with the LEDs” doesn’t make a picture in my head, or at least… it doesn’t make a picture that I can trust is accurate. I would have to see it drawn or photographed clearly, but the phrase makes me imagine one resistor politioned on the positive wire where it leaves the bus, then a long string of lights connected to each other, then the last negative wire coming back around to the bus. But wouldn’t multiple lights overpower the single resistor?
Wow, Brent, that is a really useful pair of photos, and your explanation is clear. I think I get it. This doesn’t look that difficult.
I think the most difficult part of this will be soldering connections. I used heat shrink tubing once with a soldering iron and it made a gloopy mess. It looks like you’ve left yours uncovered.
The other thing is, even with that distro board that WeHonest sells, he admits the wires on the LED wires are too small for the screw connectors to grab, so he talks about soldering pin ends to them, but I don’t see that he sells the pin ends.
So I have a little homework to do, but I’m very excited because I think these lamps look pretty good.
Dave, your comments above overwhelmed me a little at first, but now that I’ve read more and seen some of how things are hooked up, it makes a lot of sense. Thank you!
Just cut a piece of solid wire of a suitable size and use that as a pin by soldering the light wires to it.
I made this hoodadaddy to test the brightness of the LEDs to determine what resistor I want to use in advance. I can try different resistors and the step down converter will also control brightness to some degree. Ignore the wire bender thingie, I use that to bend the tubing for the lights.
I have kept every wall-wart of every appliance/electronics I have ever thrown out so finding a power source is easy.
With such low voltage, I do not worry about sealing the soldered connections except where a short could possibly occur, then a dab of paint or nail polish will do. When you consider how thin the insulation is on the wire, paint or nail polish is overkill.
To remove the insulation on the wire you can just dip the end into a bead of solder. That removes the insulation and tins the wire at the same time. I use #38 magnet wire from Ngineering.
I misunderstood Brent’s previous post. I was unfamiliar with the resistors he used.
To understand serial vs parallel imagine a simple DC circular layout with a standard Alas terminal piece. Every piece of rail is connected in serial.
If you are collecting Medicare, when you were a kid, Christmas tree lights came as a serial connection. If one light burned out, that was part of the series and none of the lights would light. You had to change every light bulb till you found the one that was burned out.
Parallel connection, big improvement in Christmas lighting. Imagine you ran a two wire buss around your DC circle. And you connected two feeders from each and every rail to the bus. You could take a Dremel cut off wheel and chop through every track joiner and yet every piece of rail would have power. That’s parallel
They show male pin terminals like RRMel used to use. I don’t have a link to his website. There are also female matching pins. They come in a big strip but you can score them to get any number of pins or sockets you need. You solder your wire to the small end of the male terminal.
My link to the terminals is the first one I found on Ebay. It is not a recommendation of the seller.
Henry told you about pin headers in the previous post. I strongly recommend that you buy some! They would work well for clamping the magnet wire into your WeHonest Distribution boards if you want to go that route (although, the easiest solution is to just nip 3/8" off of the ends of your resistors and solder the cut ends to the magnet wire). Also, in your case, using the pin connectors under your structure will make it easy to remove the building from the layout when necessary.
I use the pin headers to make up connector plugs for all sorts of situations. I have used them to connect locomotives to their tenders and to make easy disconnects for illuminated structures. I put them in line when I am hard wiring decoders so the decoder can be removed without having to unsolder any wires.
The pin headers that are shown in the eBay listing are actually both male and female. The pin(s) on one header section will fit tightly into the hole(s) in the next header section, like this (double click on the pictures to get a close up view):
Unconnected:
Connected:
The female sockets:
Solder the wires from one part of the circuit onto the exposed pins on one half of the connecter, and then solder the wires from the other part of the circuit into the holes on the other half of the connector. You will need a pencil tip soldering iron to solder the wires into the female sockets, and you have to be quick or the plastic will melt. I always tin my wires beforehand and I put a tiny drop of flux on the tinned wire and into the socket hole. You may want to practise soldering the wires into the female sockets a bit before adding the connectors to your project.
Here is a locomotive where I had to replace the original connecter plug with a new section of a pin header
So far I’m tracking with everyone, and these solutions seem like good ones, but I’m confused at your mention of a “magnet wire”. What is it and why are we talking about it? I don’t remember seeing it on any of the WeHonest illustrations and the LEDs I bought only have two wires each, a black and a red. If I knew what you meant by that I might be able to understand why we’d be clipping off 3/8" from the resistor ends.
Magnet wire is very thin wire it can be as thin as 44 ga. I initially thought your picture was magnet wire but blowing it up, I think it’s just traditional small gauge wire. Magnet wire has a polymer enamel insulation. People use it for surface mount LED’s but is not relevant to this thread.
I gave a link to magnet wire above. My roundhouse lights are hanging on magnet wire.
When putting the structure on the layout I run the magnet wire down through the foam base in a tube of some sort to a terminal strip. Because the wire is so fine I solder it to a bit of wire (maybe 16G) that plugs into the terminal strip. The step-down converter is connected to the terminal strip.
The lengthy wire on your resistors can be cut back, I think that is what Dave is referring to. I like to keep the resistor with the structure, while I use the tiny chip resistors you can usually hide the larger ones inside or under the base.
As an aside, magnet wire is coated with enamel instead of the traditional plastic insulation, so that magnet cores can be wound tighter with more turns of wire. I use it for wiring small things like signals where lots of wires go up and down through a very small space. It’s not necessary for structure wiring because you just don’t need to squeeze wires into a tight space.
I was using the term ‘magnet wire’ somewhat generically to refer to very fine wires with a very thin coating of insulation. Many of the pre-wired LEDs come with that type of wire attached, and as you have already noted, they are too thin to be clamped into the screw terminals.
I apologise for not explaining the use of the cut off resistor leads more clearly. In order to get the ‘magnet wires’ to clamp into the screw terminals, you need to attach a larger piece of wire to the LED leads. The resistors simply provide an easy source for short pieces of suitably sized wire, but any wire will do. Take the piece that you cut off of the resistor and solder it to the end of the LED lead and then clamp the larger wire into the screw terminal. Resistor leads usually get shortened anyhow, so you are just making use of some scrap wire that you already have on hand.
I mentioned that you could also do the same thing with single pin headers. Solder the LED lead into the hole in the pin header and then clamp the male end of the pin leader into the screw terminal. However, that seems like extra work. Soldering a suitably sized piece of wire to the LED lead works just as well.
I just thought of another option. Depending on the spacing of the screw terminals, you could theoretically clamp one of the resistor leads directly into the screw terminal and solder the LED lead to the other end of the resistor. I haven’t done this personally, but I don’t see why it wouldn’t work, and it would keep the wiring very neatly organized.
@Dave, this last from you explains everything else that I was still unclear on. Thank you very much. I’m going to order that distro board, I think, and I will go back and read through this entire thread again. People have given very specific recommendations for their favorite sources of resistors and pins and all the rest, and there are images to stare at. It’s all here. What a great help you have all been, and I’m extra delighted because I hadn’t even intended to make the kit lighted at first, and now it will not only be lighted but it has a working exterior lamp over the upper dock that was not part of the kit, but looks like it should have been. I’m very pleased.
I’ll post a photo when I get it wired up, but I gotta plug those light leaks first
I just looked at the power distribution circuit board from Wehonest, and I have to correct an assumption that I had made. I didn’t realize that the outputs were only 3 volts. I had assumed that the outputs were 12 volts. Therefore, there is no need for resistors if you use the board. The board also allows you to dim the LEDs if you so choose.
There are simpler and less expensive ways for you to power your LEDs but I won’t distract you now by going into detail. If you want me to explain those options then just ask.
Wehonest has several different distribution boards. On them there is jumper which selects either 3 volts or board input voltage. Depending on the board there may be only one jumper or several.
