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Following a successful build powering a seventies 4,5 volt locomotive via a PF receiver and a 4.8 volt 4xAA battery pack, I wanted to make a second one. But I had no spare 4.5V motors left, I have 4x 12 volt spares though. And the 12 volt motors run much faster than the 4,5 volt motors, so it would be great to build a similar thing with a 12 volt engine. I ordered a bunch of DC-DC converters, 3 pcs that convert 5V to 12V, and a few others, adjustable. I did some trials tonight. So a 4.8V battery pack, followed by the DC-DC converter, verified it's output is 12V, feeding that into a PF receiver, and its output to a 12V old seventies motor. The train ran very well in the test setup, both amazingly powerful and very fast. So I set out to build it together in a model. That's where trouble started. Upon connecting the battery with the DC-DC converter with connected PF receiver, smoke came out of the DC-DC converter. Afterwards, I connected the PF receiver to a lab supply, and it still worked. I reckoned I had a bad unit and took one of the other 3 identical units. That at first worked, but then I noticed that the same IC that had smoked on the first unit, got extremely hot here too. And the sad end result a few attempts later was that now, the PF receiver is dead. No light, no sign of life. No smoke either, but... And the lab power supply conforms it: it's dead. I don't think I did anything wrong. The DC-DC converter can handle 8 watts, which ought to be largely sufficient: I never observed a 12V motor drawing over 400mA current, not even when almost stalled. And the DC-DC converters started getting hot/smoking right away, so under no-load conditions. On the other hand, two devices failing in a row in the same manner seems no coincidence. I have other DC-DC converters that can handle more, but that is moot right now, because my PF receiver died so I can't continue doing tests. Did any of you have success with attempting something like this? I'll do a new attempt when I receive a new PF receiver, but any tips are of course welcome... Legotux
