So in the Protothrottle group.io message stream, a HO scale modeler posted that he came up with a means of driving locomotive fans off a sound decoder.

“While not specifically ProtoThrottle-ish, this NAR SD38-2 will be one of the prime units on the roster. One of the nice things about the TCS decoder line is the ability to tie the sound of something to a function output. So lets say you have working fans, driven by a pwm stream from a pic chip (or two) and you want the fans to turn while the random fan sound goes off. No problem. (and that’s my story and I’m sticking to it)
The motors are geared pager motors that can be driven down to about 15rpm. The code in the pic chips has them ramping up and down, and while I could have coded it to all be driven from one chip, the smt boards are so small and so easy there’s almost no point in optimizing the code. (oh the humanities!) Once the rest of the lighting is in, I’ll do some video.”

This lead to someone else pointing to this in O scale.

http://midwesternmodelworks.com/operational-fans/

Anyway, I thought some of you might be interested in this. Anyone ever thought about doing this in large scale? As if I need another detour of a project, but it might be kind of cool to see.

Got a video clip of them running full speed cooling the radiators ? Sound is everything when one strives for prototypical accuracy “modeling” a 1:1 scale.

BTW the blades don’t have the proper pitch either

On my RS 3 I disabled the smoke generator, so my locomotive doesn’t smoke, but the fan turns. I also painted the blades silver so they can be seen through the grill. But since I run on analog DC track power, the fan just runs when the train is in motion.

I considered powering the fans in my GP-7 when I added sound and RC. I was going to use cell phone vibrator motors which you can get for cheap on ebay. I acquired some motors but in the end decided it would be more trouble than it was worth for a locomotive that only sees duty as a visiting piece of motive power.

I have a friend that wants the fans to turn on his Geep…(USAT), so he is pressurizing the shell with a small blower, and the fans turn. Another friend has tried a small fan aimed at the model fans without making a pressurization chamber, that worked to a degree also. The vagaries of the friction of the “model fan bearing” is the variable on the fan speeds.

It’s kind of fun, and not that difficult.

Greg

Greg Elmassian said:

I have a friend that wants the fans to turn on his Geep…(USAT), so he is pressurizing the shell with a small blower, and the fans turn. Another friend has tried a small fan aimed at the model fans without making a pressurization chamber, that worked to a degree also. The vagaries of the friction of the “model fan bearing” is the variable.

It’s kind of fun, and not that difficult.

Greg

That’s awesome …I wish I had friends that played with toy trains .

Maybe you should…