THE NEXT WARNING! Scaletrains GEVO Tier 4

[Schraddel]

Hello,

until now i was dealing with the mechanical installation of the preferred decoder and speaker.


As user SRY told earlier in this thread, the ditch light are not flashing on CN locos. So it is possible and easy going to connect the ditchlights together with the headlights and map them also to function button f1.
To get a tidy wiring i made a cluster of resistors for the different LEDs.





Keep tidy, messy it will become alone. A piece of black self adhesive Coroplast insulation tape was mounten under the resistors onto the metal block for my sleep well. Also this was done to other critical points.





Here these LEDs are wired now:
- front light
- front ditch lights
- number board lights
- rear headlight
- rear ditch lights





And now the DPU lights with their thin magnet wire are wired too. They are wired to separate function outputs. Now all of the mounted LEDs are acessible by the decoder without secret outputs.
Before reattaching the shell a complete function test was made.





The shell fits without jamming or tricks and i can start programming the decoder to my needs. Still one point to do; making of adhesive stickers: "100% ESU-Free"




What remains:


Note:, that is not a decoder, it is only a mother board.

My resume about Scaletrains.
Scaletrains is very submissive to ESU and their works standards and obliged their customers to do also. Good for ESU-fanatics, but not all customers like ESU products. I ask myself why they try to penalize those customers who simply want to plug in their preferred brand of decoders. But this is torpedoed by Scaletrains by some strange behavior like the deviation of familar standards and agreements.
E.g. resulting:
- not convenient space and mounting for replacement motherboards (Atlas, Intermountain and Bowser is no problem to install it) , here only the ESU works standard motherboard fits
- non-standard pin assigment of the otherwise standardized MTC21 connector ("foreign" decoders wil not work)
- non standard coupler box (no way to mount Kadees without milling)
- non standard wire colour code

If i might have desires for more such Diesel locos, then i will not purchase Sclaletrains products which are compulsorily connected with ESU behavior, but will choose the alternative options. Athough the motherboard in the Intermountain GE ES44DC also was made by ESU, there is a quick and simply plug-and-play task to change out decoders for your preferred brand of your own choice.

And a strange experience. When i had plugged in the new sound decoder into my Intermountain ES44DC, the previously there provided ESU decoder was a left over. So why not plug it in into one of the Scaletrains ET44AC Tier4`s? Both have the MTC21 connector and done. But then just the same decoder, which worked flawless in the Intermountain before, failed here in the Scaletrains. Why :?:

Thank you for watching my remarks about digitalizing some locos.