Large Scale Central

Sierra Sound cards "Farting"

I have 2 Sierra sound cards that may have died. In the most basic wire up, I put power from a transformer and a speaker and all I got was farting noises. I then hooked up a battery to it and still just the farting/skipping noises. There is no bell, whistle or chuff that used to be triggered with increases to the track voltage.
What happened? Any ideas?

Check if it is hooked up to a speaker in the bathroom

I’ll buy them as is!

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Do you fix these Rooster or are you looking to add sound to an outhouse?

Speaking of Outhouses… Did Bob manage to pawn off the traveling outhouse last spring at the show? If so, where did it go?

Todd;

Perhaps you could salvage those boards to replicate the sound of an air tank relief valve! I always thought they made that sound anyway.

With tongue in cheek, David Meashey

I think Bob still has it. And it might be in need of a sound card.

Try a different speaker and see what happens. Just a thought…

It’s funny that you mention the speaker John because I fixed the boards.
It turns out that the one in the tender was having a problem because one speaker wire was hanging on by a thread. This setup started failing while moving down the track.
On the loose card I was testing I didn’t push the battery pack plug in deep enough. They can be tough to unplug so I pushed it in half way to test and the card just wasn’t getting the power.
How silly is that. Lesson learned, Always double and triple check that your wires and batteries have a solid connection. :grin:

Now to figure out where to put that extra card. It has a nice tone to it like an early steam train would.

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If someone can in fact fix these, I have one that has smoked probably the regulator and capacitor and ???

This can and will happen if you use supercaps rather than the battery and you run the board at ~12 volts in a point-to-point situation. The cap never has time to fully charge and the board sees it as a short circuit with lots of “farting” sounds. The board can do this several times without damage, but eventually if you keep it up you will release the magic smoke.

If the OPs unit does this continually, the battery is gone.