Sub forum for model railway electronics?

[siriushardware]

Merely to add my thoughts on this subject.

The suggestion given here as "Other" as an alternative would be of great use to simpletons like myself who, right at this moment in time, have neither DC nor DCC running!

I will need some guidance at a later date that has nothing to do with either DC or DCC!

Regards, Peter.

Hello Peter, I'm curious to know what the non-DC, non DCC, but electrical/electronics related subject might be.

Mains wiring perhaps? Should we make that a third distinct category?

[petercharlesfagg]

Hello Peter, I'm curious to know what the non-DC, non DCC, but electrical/electronics related subject might be.

Mains wiring perhaps? Should we make that a third distinct category?

At the time of writing the post I had nothing running on my layout, neither DC nor DCC!

The subject in my mind was and is LED's which run on AC, DC and, as I understand things, on DCC!

Mains electricity would come under the same category, or,  "Other"?

Regards, Peter.

[siriushardware]

At the time of writing the post I had nothing running on my layout, neither DC nor DCC!

The subject in my mind was and is LED's which run on AC, DC and, as I understand things, on DCC!

Mains electricity would come under the same category, or,  "Other"?

Regards, Peter.

Fundamentally, an LED (just the device itself) is a DC device. The clue is in the name, really - Light Emitting Diode.

For most purposes a diode (and therefore an LED, a specialised type of diode) can be thought of as an electrical one-way valve - you can pass current through it one way but not the other. It's this very property which allows diodes to be used in rectifiers, which convert AC to DC (more correctly, they convert AC to pulsed DC - a capacitor is then used to smooth out the pulses to produce reasonably smooth DC).

However, to make things a little bit more complicated, an LED (with a suitable series resistor) will run perfectly well on AC - or it will seem to. In reality, it will only be on 50 percent of the time.

So most LEDs that will be used on layouts, either as indicators or for lighting, will be controlled by enabling or disabling the DC current flow through them. You can do this either with a physical switch, or with an electronic switch such as the 'accessory' control output which might be found integrated into many DCC decoders. At the LED end of things, a DCC controlled LED still operates on DC.

And then there's mains LED lighting, which appears to run happily on mains AC, but in fact usually incorporates a miniature AC to DC power converter circuit within the bulb itself - so even they, although they appear to (and do) run on AC, are actually DC devices.

I admit that AC powered LED lighting (along with all other discussions about mains wiring) would not fit comfortably into either 'DCC' or 'DC', so I'm coming around to your way of thinking, that there would need to be an 'Other electrical / electronics' category alongside 'DCC' and 'DC'.

[austinbob]

At the time of writing the post I had nothing running on my layout, neither DC nor DCC!

The subject in my mind was and is LED's which run on AC, DC and, as I understand things, on DCC!

Mains electricity would come under the same category, or,  "Other"?

Regards, Peter.

Fundamentally, an LED (just the device itself) is a DC device. The clue is in the name, really - Light Emitting Diode.

For most purposes a diode (and therefore an LED, a specialised type of diode) can be thought of as an electrical one-way valve - you can pass current through it one way but not the other. It's this very property which allows diodes to be used in rectifiers, which convert AC to DC (more correctly, they convert AC to pulsed DC - a capacitor is then used to smooth out the pulses to produce reasonably smooth DC).

However, to make things a little bit more complicated, an LED (with a suitable series resistor) will run perfectly well on AC - or it will seem to. In reality, it will only be on 50 percent of the time.

So most LEDs that will be used on layouts, either as indicators or for lighting, will be controlled by enabling or disabling the DC current flow through them. You can do this either with a physical switch, or with an electronic switch such as the 'accessory' control output which might be found integrated into many DCC decoders. At the LED end of things, a DCC controlled LED still operates on DC.

And then there's mains LED lighting, which appears to run happily on mains AC, but in fact usually incorporates a miniature AC to DC power converter circuit within the bulb itself - so even they, although they appear to (and do) run on AC, are actually DC devices.

I admit that AC powered LED lighting (along with all other discussions about mains wiring) would not fit comfortably into either 'DCC' or 'DC', so I'm coming around to your way of thinking, that there would need to be an 'Other electrical / electronics' category alongside 'DCC' and 'DC'.

I think you might just have fused Peter's brain!!