Lilput FLIRT Next18 DCC Sound Installation

Hello,

It's been a while, sorry.  Got married, went to Alaska, some change at work, been building a ship and developed a recent interest in woodworking.  Anyhow, back to trains!

Today I installed an ESU LokSound Micro 4.0 DCC decoder with a Next18 interface into a Lilput Triebwagen FLIRT RABe 526 #163992.

I've spelled out the part names exactly in the hope that anyone googling on the subject lands here and gets to read what I have to say on the subject before trying this, because I sure wish I had found a page like this one prior.

Here's the short version:   Don't do it.

So here's the longer version:

Installing a LokSound decoder into this train is a huge pain in the ass, it's not worth the stress or trouble.  Why?  Because it does not fit.    And yes, I did cram mine in there, but I did so at the expense of damaging my train.  Let me walk you through the difficulties:

1) You have to take the train apart.  It's not meant to be taken apart.  All four cars are permanently linked, so the small thing you are working on has an awkward and fragile 24" appendage that you don't even want to rotate, lest you apply too much torque to the coupling mechanism.

2) The ESU Loksound Micro 4.0 does not fit.   It's the smallest sound decoder there is, and it's too wide and too long.

3) The speaker won't fit.  I had to do terrible things to make it work, and even so, there are still issues.

4) Did I mention the decoder won't fit?  Well, I lie, it does fit as long as you are willing to take a knife to the engine body shell and shave off bits, and solder one of the lights off, and cut the engine compartment interior backing in half, and Dremel out a bunch of plastic that makes up the top of the cab.   Then it fits.  If you do this, will you be happy about it?   I'm guessing no.

So, how did I do this to myself?  The new Lilput FLIRT models are really gorgeous.  Jerry at Quintopia has an excellent review that had me sold.  I ordered the SBB version and saw that it came with something called a Next18 DCC socket.   Well, this is new to me but I love new tech, so all good.   Then I read on a forum someone commenting that this EMU had space for sound, in the authors opinion.  Well, knowing the value of an opinion on a forum I jumped at the chance to sink more money into this toy and ordered a LokSound micro 4.0 with the newfangled Next18 socket, and an ESU LokProgrammer.  The LokProgrammer is a largely redundant piece of hardware but it's one meaningful feature (and one that IMO should be included with the ECOS) is writing new sound data to their LokSound decoders.

This is a next 18 socket, though on a smaller decoder:

Having made this now very expensive I began to wait.  The wait took 11 months before the Lilput model arrived.  I love how the model train industry can sell you on things that don't exist yet.  I can't imagine many other businesses getting away with that.  How long would Sears stay in business if your lawn mower arrived 11 months after you bought it?  But I digress...   In the interim the decoder and LokProgrammer showed up and I promptly lost the PC cables to connect it- more on that later.

So, happy day, Saturday afternoon, the sun is shining, my wife is out shopping, the dog is blissfully quiet and I prepare to do the install.  I clean a big space on the table gather tools, and jump in.

The speaker is in a small enclosure needed so it can make meaningful volume.  This does not fit at all.  It's as wide as the train.  I take the enclosure apart and cut off it's sides.  It's now seemingly narrow enough to fit inside the train.  I check carefully that it's no wider then the PCB, looks good.  I test that I can slide the body of the train over it, it seems to fit.  Good.

The enclosure is chopped down to size.  The fit is so tight the body shell will replace the sides no problem.

So, width solved, now comes the matter of location.  The speaker does not fit anywhere out of sight, as this train is full of huge windows.  Oh well, I bite the bullet on this, we'll see the speaker.  Still, it just does not fit, and I'm forced to get a snipper and cut the tops off of the front row of seats in the first car.  I hate to do this, but if I don't make this work what I am going to do with this Next18 decoder and LokProgrammer?

Pretty snug, but it works!  Note the huge PCB looming on the right- that causes trouble soon....

Next is the problem of the speaker wires.  Something tiny is required, so I salvage some super thin stuff from a burnt out Fleishmann Semaphore signal I bought on ebay.  Getting the wires from the decoder down to the speaker is another problem, as the PCB creates something of an internal ceiling.  I took my pin vise and expanded the holes already in the PCB for the retention mechanism that holds the board in place and threaded my wires through.

This was fun!  Note the missing backrests on the seats to the right.

Next I soldered my tiny wires to the tiny speaker, pulled the slack back up, and slipped the speaker in place.  So far, not too bad.

Now it got pretty horrible.  I test fitted the decoder and discovered that it's about 5 mm too long!  The LED that lights up the destination board is in the way!

Well, in for a penny, in for a pound....  I took my soldering iron to the LED's PCB and loosened it up and pulled it off.  Damn!   That's a really nice detail lost.  So now I'm able to properly seat the decoder, so I proceed.

Something's not quite right.  Can you spot it too?

Soldering 2 wires onto a tiny decoder is hard.  Maybe you have mad soldering skills, but I'm a pretty normal person and it's not a nice thing to do.  The contact point is something like 1.5mm x 1 mm, maybe less.  About 0.5mm next to it is the next terminal, the one I can't touch at all lest I meld the two together with my hot iron...  a miserable task.   Once the first wire is on I look it over and realize the heat from the solder has melted the plastic off the wire close to my connection.   If the same happens for the second wire they are likely to short out- not good.  I snip a 4mm length of heat shirk tubing on the second wire, so I can slide it up in place once it's attached and keep it safe.

The second terminal went a little better, then I used my heat shrink, and started to feel pretty good about this install after all.  Silly me.

All wired up, I'm feeling foolishly optimistic.

Now the fun part.  These new FLIRT EMU's look great but they are awkward to mess with, awkward to get the body on and off of, and awkward to handle because they are 4 cars long.  Fitting the body sell onto the locomotive proved very challenging.   When I finally got it seated properly on the back end I discovered that the decoder is both too wide and too long for the body shell.  Also, my speaker is too wide for the thickness of the windows inside the car.  Triple Arrrgh!

I proceeded to take a knife to the body and carve out some thickness for the decoder.  I also cut the internal end off the shell, since this is covered by the cap at the end anyhow.  I also had to cut down some of the interior of the roof cap piece, and carve out some of the interior volume of the driver's cab.  A lot of plastic was destroyed in making this fit.

Yellow is a cut mode to the body shell, Blue is the cut made on the cab end.

As for the speaker, my best option seems to be living with it.  The car's body bulges slightly if viewed from underneath, but from above and to a casual observer it seems fine.

Obviously wrong when viewed from below

Oddly not visible from above

The driver's cab now fits poorly as well. This is what bothers me most.  Where it's seamless on the unmodified end, there's a distinct seam now visible where I messed with it.  If you were unfamiliar with the model I don't think you would think anything of it, and probably not even notice that the two cabs are subtly different.  That said, I know it's wrong, and I can see it immediately.  It's not a big deal in the grand scheme of things, but I'd rather it was right.

Here you can see the two ends of the train.  Happily, it's not this obvious on the table,

Now the moment of truth!  Did I just turn some very expensive parts into a static model of little value, or will it run?  I put it on my test track and HUZZA, she drives!  The ECOS immediately detected the Railcom device, assigned it a free address and I was off to the races.   The factory sound in quite incorrect but that's a fight for another day.  My early impression of it's driving characteristics is that they are excellent.  Pickup on all wheels and two motors make for a happy little train.

Lesson Learned: No more DCC Sound self installs.