I will admit I have no clue on this type of electrical i am installing Ditch Lights on my locomotives And I need a resistor on them due to DCC. I have the resistors and bulbs but I dont know what side of the bulb to install it on. Also how do you hook up the resistor? in othe words whats input and whats output on them? Thanks for any advice.
It doesn’t matter which lead the resistor is wired into. Since you’re using DCC, the resistor needs to be spliced into one of the wires between the decoder and bulb. The value of the resistor is going to depend on how you have the bulbs wired; i.e., in series or parallel. If both bulbs are connected separately to the decoder, that’s parallel; if one lead from each bulb are wired together and the other leads to the decoder, that’s series wiring. Without knowing the amperage and voltage draw of your bulbs and how they are wired, the value of the necessary resistor cannot be determined.
Page 62 of the August 2006 issue of Model Railroader magazine has an article on how to wire grain-of-rice bulbs through diodes to create constant lighting for DC use. Since you have DCC, you would just substitute a resistor for the diodes.
I suggest that you download or purchase a copy of the Digitrax Mobile Decoder User Manual from their web site and study the light wiring diagrams shown in it.
Page 33 of the August 2006 issue of Model Railroader has information about wiring LEDs to a DCC decoder.
Luckily Its easier than you think, you can put the resistor on either bulb lead and resistors dont care how they are hooked up. Put it wherever you want basically.
So the color bands on the resistors are just for show? i actually got the issue on Friday I should go check that out thanks for the input.
No. They show the value of the resistor.
Jeff
Ok so thas all it does, I can hook it up at either end and I shouldnt have issues? can we say I am a little scared of killing a decoder or lights lol.
The color bands on a resistor designate its value in Ohms. These values, up to 1,000 Ohms, are:
Black = 0
Brown = 1
Red = 2
So a 1,000 Ohm resistor, aka 1K, would be Brown, Black, Red, or 1 + 0 + 2 more zeroes. A fourth band of silver or gold determines the degree of tolerance from the marked value, with silver being 10 percent and gold 5 percent.
If you need to know the rest of the color values, type the phrase “resistor color code” (without the quotation marks) into Google or other search engine.
yep, resistors work just the same either way. You probably wont damage the decoder unless you get a short somewhere. As long as there is some resistance in the circuit you will be fine.
0 Black
1 Brown
2 Red
3 Orange
4 Yellow
5 Green
6 Blue
7 Violet
8 Grey
9 White
If you lay the bulbs flat, solder the left lead on each bulb together and the same for the right leads. Both bulbs will be parallel to each other. The best is to solder the resistor to the left leads as in DC, the left is usually the “live” or positive lead. The resistor should be soldered in series w/the lead from the bulbs.
Ch
If you lay the bulbs flat, solder the left lead on each bulb together and the same for the right leads. Both bulbs will be parallel to each other. The best is to solder the resistor to the left leads as in DC, the left is usually the “live” or positive lead. The resistor should be soldered in series w/the lead from the bulbs.
Ch