Trying to light a Kato business car and keep getting flicker once the car is moving. The car is brand new. I have checked and cleaned all the contact strips and wheel sets. It almost seems that the car is too light as down pressure by hand alleviates most of the flicker. Any similar experiences out there?
Make sure you track is clean. I experienced that problem and thought it was me. I added the Kato LED kit to my Operation North Pole set. It ran fine on my small layout at home. One day I took it to a train show and ran it on another club's N-Trak layout. It was a huge layout, 30' x 60' so there were many modules from many people. The lighting was flickering all day long! The joke during that day was it was causing epileptic seizures with the passengers! At the time, I was trying to troubleshoot the problem without taking off the shell. Too many chances of losing something or breaking something at a train show. Like you tapping the shell or pushing down slightly alleviates the flickering. When I came home I was all ready to tear everything apart to see what was going on. But first I ran it on my home layout just to double check. No flickering at all! Hugh? So I left everything alone. The next time there was a train show I took the set, untouched, back to the N-Trak layout. Yep, flickering! As a further confirmation I borrowed a Brite Boy and cleaned a small section of track and each time the train went over that newly cleaned section, there was no flickering.
yes, most of the Kato passenger cars have a lot of flicker, using their lighting kits. I keep meaning to figure out what the best way would be to add a small capacitor across the circuit, but it has never reached my "critical requirement" level, yet.
Well, it would certainly be easier if Kato had used a small bridge rectifier on their board, versus a diode array. There are only three components on the board: a diode array, a resistor and an LED. They have the current limiting resister (560 ohms) before the diode array, as shown here: (apologies if I have the LED shown backwards, I can never remember which way to orient in a drawing - I'm a chemist, not an EE) In theory, one should be able to put a capacitor bridging the red and blue lines from the array, but would also need to add an additional resistor on one leg, so that any rush out of the capacitor does not blow the LED. But, someone should double check my polarities before trying to wire with this diagram.
Is the 560Ω resistor indeed located on the input (AC) side of the bridge rectifier/diode array? The schematic on the following page shows it as on the output (DC) side: http://www.sumidacrossing.org/ModelTrains/ModelTrainDCC/CarInteriorLighting/
Recently I made a little circuit to install constant tail lights in the last car of my Kato Amtrak Superliner train. It has a bridge rectifier, regulator, super capacitor, and current limiting resistors for each of the two LED's. I looked and saw nothing like this available from Kato. In fact the Superliner car's tail lights are a solid red plastic so light would not go through them and I had to make my own clear lenses. It seems to me like it's time for Kato to update their interior lighting circuits to include a super capacitor and maybe an option for tail lights.
ESU has a lighting kit that will work and have the red tail lights as part of the assembly. The car illumination - http://store.sbs4dcc.com/ESU50708PassengerCarLightingKit-WarmWhite-DigitalSet.aspx Tail lights - http://store.sbs4dcc.com/ESU50705TailLightLightingKit2LED-Red.aspx Both have built in decoders and stable circuitry so you get no flicker I use DCC with these but I would have to check to see if they can be setup to use DC.
And if you are looking at dirt cheap and small, these are great from Geoff Bunza: https://model-railroad-hobbyist.com/node/22380 Just a tiny rectifier, a cap, and a buck DC/DC board the size of thumbnail. For extra safety if you are worried about high transient current into the cap at startup, stick a 47 Ohm resistor in series with one of the input leads.
I’ve tapped in off the Kato light board to run Caps for an RGB LED but never tried to do antiflicker on them directly.
