Progress With NCE Illuminators

Well, after several weeks of struggle with NCE, I'm making progress. I got four Illuminators back from support, though I was still puzzled that only one port, the one defined in the documentation as the W/G port, would light. The others were "off". Now, the NCE Illuminstor is generally thought to be an equivalent to the Woodland Scenics Light Hub that I talked about here, except that it runs off the DCC bus and can be controlled from the DCC command station or cab.

What gets me is that NCE has a real winner of a product in the Illuminator. The Woodland Scenics Light Hub requires a separate AC/DC circuit or even a wall wart. Then it needs special accessories to gang light hubs, control extra functions, turn things on and off, and so forth. These cost money and take space. The illuminator will do the extra functions via DCC commands without extra cost, takes less space, and is still otherwise fully Just Plug compatible. But NCE doesn’t even market it as a Just Plug product, and now I find that you have to reprogram it to make it work with Just Plug. But what other use can the product have?

So I finally heard from higher-ups at NCE, who at least explained what the actual defaults are in an Illuminator and how to turn the other two ports on, which are off by default. Except that fewer than half the Illuminators I bought were shipped with those defaults, which of course was part of the confusion. But at least I now know how to make a product intended to act like a Woodland Scenics Light Hub actually work like one. Here is my Illuminator installation reinstalled. These nine ports control about a 24-inch segment of 14th Street in Bay City.

It simply would not be possible to mount equivalent Just Plug Light Hubs in the same space. The nine ports control nine different lighting features, six buildings, two street lights, and an East Coast Circuits lighted River Point Station mantainer's truck. I tried out two Walthers Cornerstone street lights, which I spliced into the Just Plug-compatible plug pigtails that come with an Illuminator:

These are the concrete column lights, which look a lot like the ones near where we live. These Walthers lights need one Illuminator port per light.

Here are the structure lights. These are done with Just Plug stick-on warm white LEDS, with the plugs fed into Illuminator ports.

And here is the River Point Station maintainer's truck in its final position on the layout. This has the lead wires spliced into the Just Plug-compatible plug and pigtail provided with the Illuminator. These have come in very handy for my lighting projects.

Clearly the Blue Bird Cafe is also due for lights. Once I got the Illuminators figured out, I'm seeing that lighting projects are fairly simple and fairly inexpensive, but they add an enormous amount to a layout. And since I'm pretty much full-up with rolling stock for the rest of a lifetime, lighting is a good way to put effort into a layout that doesn't challenge existing space constraints, since it mostly involves buildings and scenery that are already in place.