Super. Good video. A long time ago, a friend of mine owned a surplus electronics store, and knew electronics quite well, while I was an electrician, and knew residential and commercial wiring quite well. He was having issues with his store's electrical, and I made him a proposition. At the time, I had four passenger trains, a 21 car heavyweight B&O "Royal Blue", an 18 car streamlined "Colorado Zephyr," (My personal fantasy train.) a 12 car "1890" period passenger train, and a 14 car commuter train. (Two seven car trains, one east, one west.) I said that if he would wire up every car with lights, a power keeper, (We called it a capacitor.🙂) a miniature connector on both ends of every car, a lit drumhead on all four observation cars, as well as marker lights and a red stop tail light, I would come by after I got off of work and work on his place, with the caveat that we both will take our time. He did a fantastic job with the passenger cars, and I had no problems either. Within three weeks, I had all 54 passenger cars back on the track, and his store was looking great. I was even able to fix his store sign, which had never worked, put in a ceiling fan, add a receptacle for a window A/C, put in an exhaust fan, replace some outlets and fix bad wiring, get all of the lights working, and fix a revolving display case, all with parts from his stores invetory, so I didn't have to spend very much. He found most everything for my train lights on his stores shelves, except for the special drumheads, marker lights, and red tail light, which I paid for. I still operate those trains to this day, and I haven't even had to replace a lightbulb yet. The lights in the cars really reflect off of the snow, and they look great in the moonlight. I think we both got serendipity at the time, but he was almost as happy to have his lights working as I was to have my lights working. Value of my time, around $360 at $9 per relaxed hour, with lunch and breaks, (Long ago.) and only he knows how much time he spent on my train, but he had to fix about two and a half cars a day to get it done so fast. He also put different pictures of us riding inside the train along with a lot of girls. I'll have to tell him that I wrote a book to you about how I got lighting in 53 HO passenger cars, and how his store's sign still lights up after all these years. Hello from the Tracy Mountain Railway in Colorado. 💙 T.E.N.

Hi! Dave, i have knowledge in electronics and i never thought of this one (diode bridge for lighting)!!! Ha ha ha! Good shot 😄

Hi Dave, wiring the caps in series only increases maximum working voltage to the combination of both; wiring the caps in parallel doubles your capacity but if the caps have mismatched working voltage, then the cap with the lowest shall be the maximum working voltage. On a side note, resistors work partially the other way; resistors wired in series double the resistance, resistors in parallel half the resistance. Example - two 1k resistors in parallel are only 500 ohms but double the wattage. Those SMT bridge terminals pad spacing work great to attach to the LED strips! Cheers, Geoff

Multi color flicker, party coach

Great explanation of the components Dave. Thanks for this educational video. 👍

JerseyBill here and I think you need to do the whole fleet of cars. Woo Who! If not that then what timothyjohnston4083 suggested. You do have to address those POINTS at some point.

Please note: basic electrical engineering - If you put two identical capacitors in SERIES, their effective value of capacitance is HALVED. If you put them in parallel, their effective value of capacitance is DOUBLED. If you want to minimize flicker over dead or dirty track spots. the capacitors should be in parallel, so that the coulomb storage capacity is greatest (a coulomb being a unit of charge, and capacitors being, essentially, devices to store charge (i.e. electrons)).

Nice Play on words with your Title, Dave. Thanks for sharing!

a nice improvement will be to add a 3.3v zener diode or 3.3v voltage regulator between the rectifier and the leds, that way you'll have constant voltage and the leds will light basically without variation regardless the voltage on the track... (tha'ts how i did it to my ones)

Great job there, I could really see the learning going on and as a teacher I'll admit it put a smile on my face. So a suggestion though, get a multimeter and find out what value your pot is set at then you can swap that part out for a much cheaper resistor. And I wouldn't classify capacitors as "crappy batteries" they charge and discharge very rapidly something a battery can not do, but more importantly as you saw the voltage output is not constant in fact it technically has voltage for an infinite amount of time (it's an exponential decay) which is why you saw the lights stay on really long even after disconnecting (but very dim). "Farad" rating on the capacitor does impact the discharge rate but also is a measure of how much charge the capacitor actually holds, but for this application of intermittent flickering you really don't need much capacity, so feel free to go cheaper with the capacitors for this application, you can always change the resistor if you don't like the discharge profile, the pot is a great way to do that for testing purposes then when you find the sweet spot just swap out those more expensive components for cheaper ones and you're good to go. But I've dug too deep with this comment I expect.

Great work and looks awesome, Dave!

I find this video/tutorial Immensely helpful!. I'll be using the smaller snd micro leds for my locos and warm white leds for my coaches.

Awesome job, Professor Dave.

A suggestion for your next "Railway Electrainics" video -- a control panel with lights indicating which way the turn outs (points) are thrown.

Excellent Dave great job

Great job Dave

Well done Dave👍

Hi Scott You are right that it looks good, but it is important that there is light at the entrance and exit so that passengers can see and not fall. The last carriage may be missing red end lights? Best regards from Denmark. Mogens V.

what a big difference in lighting between the two coaches.. fantastic work. LED street light maybe next for DIY project ?

Brilliant! Next project: LED's for track turnouts (dwarf signals).

i actually have one of these custom via amfleets in my "privatefleet" set, litteraly a bunch of custom amfleet private cars consisting of via, prr, penn central and CT rail haha!

very helpful and doable. Thanks, Dave

Thanks for posting. Those short strings of LED's should work great with my old time short passenger cars if I can figure out where to hide the capacitors. Maybe a Keep alive installation in a locomotive next?

Great result!

Excellent video. Thank you.

Great explanation 👌 thank you

Great job work out perfect ty for sharing

So Dave, are you a magician as well? How did you change that corporation bus to a greyhound coach?

The best I have seen is multiple capacitors to store a better charge. Alternately the path lights you can buy on sale form say Walmart at the end of season, have rechargeable batteries which can be wired in and will last some time.

The two capacitors should be wired negative to negative and positive to positive then to the two terminals of the led strip. Series as you have it halves the value and lets the led dim faster.

I would have to research this again to be sure, but when there is a resistor added to the capacitor circuit you need time to charge the capacitor. Then the cap discharges slowly, maybe a diode in it as well to ensure electric discharge is one way?

:-) with your brogue it sounds like electrainics.

great Job. would it be possible to get a list of parts and possibly where to get them?

Hmm..so I know some dcc locomotives have keep alives...how about trying your kit in a DC steam locomotive that maybe stutters over switch points...? A small 0-4-0? Or something's like that..even a engine that doesn't have many pickups...I'm wondering if you would be able to fix that..🤔

I`ve emailed you a couple of circuits

As far as I know you do not need to flux the wires of electronical parts because it has been done already in the factory. Avoid touching the wires with your fingers, use pliers instead and remove the short part of wire which holded them in a belt. Did you check if the resistor is capable of the power used by the LED-strip? I suppose that 16 V maximum voltage for the capacitor is a bit meager for 12 V DC, because you might experience inductive peaks of much higher voltages in an analogue driven model railway. I would recommend the 25 V-types at least, especially if you want to go digital some day. What it means to put capacitors in series has already been commented here, it halves the capacity if both are identical.

Everything is temporary until it works, then it becomes permanent

Info in the connector you used for the truck leads please! Nice job!

At 28 minutes in, you stated the two 2200 micro-Farad capacitors were wired in SERIES? To increase capacity, I believe it is typical to wire them in PARALLEL, which doubles the effective value. Did you misspeak? Confused...

Hi Dave, great video, think ive learnt something today, now to reduce all that for n scale ?

The resistor is consuming the load/charge. It is resisting.

You have to charge the capacitor for a minute or more

hi dave cracking video buddy do you have the spec or link on the retifiers so i can get some

does anyone else read the title and pronounce "electrainics" in a Scottish accent? *asking for a friend lol

Would just those light strips work on a walthers trainline coach. Without the stay alive or bridge rectifier on dcc

While the design looks great, there was one error. The capacitors should be in parallel, not series to increase the capacitance of the circuit. This works totally opposite of resistors. Placing capacitors in series decreases the capacitance while placing them in parallel increases the capacitance. This is due to the plate size and the spacing of the plates. The bigger the plates and the closer they are the higher the capacitance. Placing capacitors in series increases the plate distance which lowers the capacitance while placing them in parallel increases the plate size for more capacitance. There are more things about capacitors, but we'll leave it at this information for now. As far as diodes and LEDs, just think of them as one-way check valves that you see in something like a plumbing circuit. The water or electrons in this case will flow in one direction but are stopped in the other direction of polarity. So, two of the diodes in the bridge rectifier are allowing the electrons to move through the bridge rectifier while the other two are acting like check valves depending on the polarity. This is why you can place AC voltage through them or a DC voltage in any polarity and the output polarity is always the same.

How can I get one of those flux penns

You could install the Potential-meter directly on the chassis. The original strip offer too much resistance for the value of the Capacitors. Picot farad is a measurement of resistance.

My Thoughts Is This Do what you think needs to Be Done.

If you are using solder with flux, adding more flux is unnecessary.

NOOOOOOOOOOOO

Electronics is never that simple: from google:- With capacitors, its the reverse: parallel connections result in additive values while series connections result in diminished values. REVIEW: Capacitances diminish in series. Capacitances add in parallel. - but if it works it works!