GP9 G Scale DCC Upgrade

[murrayec]

This is a garden railway analogue GP9 loco with lights and 2 smoke generators. The client wanted to upgrade to DCC, so here we go.......

An ESU 5XL DCC sound board was chosen as it has the power for 4 motors, two in each bogie, and a bunch of aux outputs for this upgrade and anything added later. An 8ohm speaker, LED directional lights and LED cab light.

A look at the analogue system, the main board is mounted on the chassis with a number of switches underneath to set the functions, with two analogue smoke generator boards- one mounted beside the main board and the other under the hood.

So after some consideration on how to tackle this I came up with a plan.....

Cutting out a PCB mounting board for the DCC chip and one of the smoke generators, the small board is for mounting a wiring socket.

Riser blocks being cut from 10mm Tufnol sheet for mounting the PCB board to the chassis and risers for mounting the new control boards.

Boards mounted.

And the lot screwed onto the chassis, I used the old mounting lugs on the chassis to screw it down.

Replacement LED code and side light boards.

Directional LED head lights being setup.

The LEDs are hot glued into the original front light housings.

A LED cab light was also installed but no photos as to how that was done!

The speaker enclosure being setup, made from some PVC waste pipe and PCB parts CNC cut to mount and close the back after the speaker is installed. when the speaker is wired up the whole will be epoxied together.

The enclosure will be screw mounted onto the 3 lugs around the fan.

To make this part a paper impression was taken from the screw lugs on the fan, this was scanned into cad, a drawing setup and then the part was cut out on the cnc machine.

It fitted!!

The wiring socket was then made up (sorry no photos) from mini connector soldered onto a PCB board which was screw mounted under the board featured above, a cad drawing print was stuck onto the top to indicate which connection was for what. The bogies, lights, smoke generators and cab light were all wired up and in this photo its all under test and being programmed.

The system complete and the hood about to be bolted down and then off for a test run on it's home layout.

The only problems encountered with the DCC chip, was with the analogue smoke generator boards, eventually the boards were take out of the loop and the generators were connected straight to the chip and controlled from there.

Unfortunately I lost the video of it running and making it's sounds, when the memory chip on the phone bit the dust. Next time when on a visit I will take some video of it.........

Eoin.