I’ve been working on a home-made set of widgets to convert this locomotive to R/C and battery power. It’s a chance to do some circuit design, soldering and a bit of embedded software engineering for fun. The idea is to completely replace the insides of the locomotive with inexpensive, off the shelf components. I will use those to drive the main motive power- a 15v 3500mah Nimh battery array, and tap off that to provide stereo sound and lighting control.
While the motor controller was easy- I’m using the Pololu 18v7, the sound and R/C switches for the lights and the reversing power relay was where the fun was so I designed my own board. It uses an Atmel Attiny84 microprocessor, two mp3 player cards, a 3A power relay and two power mosfets.
Anyhow, the innards of the Aristocraft RS3 were not impressive. Complicated rats nest if you ask me. I have no interest in track power nor DCC so I just gutted the entire thing down to the leads on the motor trucks. I did save the two small circuit boards that plug into those but everything else with the exception of the 7805 power regulator got tossed.
I have the sound/relay card almost finished, as things progress I’ll post more details. Here it is stripped all the way down:
And a picture of the motor truck, the colored wires are the motor leads, the two black wires go to the track pickups:
