I posted this today on RMWeb after somebody said that he had 'smoked' an ESU light board. Seeing as it might be of use to some here, please find below a copy:
Original post was in 2022:
Seem to be a bit late on this one, but on all my ESU light boards (I use the yellow version for old coaches) the first thing I do is hold the pickup wires (the two outer ones) against the board then snip through the tail light LED wires just where they join the soldering pads. I then put the board on my programming track and tweak the little screw to bring the lighting down to match the other carriages, after that assemble the light boards (I fix them with black tack) and assemble the carriage passing the pickup wires down through either the hole in the bogie or any other hole if present. I glue ESU wiper pickups into place on a bogie then when that has dried overnight I clip the wires to length, strip the ends and solder the wires to the pads on the power pickup - no need to worry about polarity as the lighting board has a rectifier. Now the sneaky bit, instead of putting a resistor on the board I simply put a loco on the programming track, IMPORTANT: note the values of the CVs you want to change of the loco. Then, put the carriage on the programming track (mine has an ESU Lok Programmer and ESU Lokprogrammer 5.2.5 on the computer). You can then set the CVs for the coach. Afterwards do not forget to remove the coach then reset the CVs for the locomotive. I have 4 CFL long coaches but the length of my railway means I can only run 2 on 1 train, if the other 2 are in a siding and have a different CV1 then their lights will not come on when you set the coach lights to come on for the train. Incidentally I used a Dymo labeller to mark the coaches as CV1 = 1 and CV1 = 2 for each pair and put the label underneath the relevant coaches. This method seems to work, never seen any smoke so I too suspect you may have removed the red LEDs but left the wires which touched the live rails.
Original post was in 2022:
Seem to be a bit late on this one, but on all my ESU light boards (I use the yellow version for old coaches) the first thing I do is hold the pickup wires (the two outer ones) against the board then snip through the tail light LED wires just where they join the soldering pads. I then put the board on my programming track and tweak the little screw to bring the lighting down to match the other carriages, after that assemble the light boards (I fix them with black tack) and assemble the carriage passing the pickup wires down through either the hole in the bogie or any other hole if present. I glue ESU wiper pickups into place on a bogie then when that has dried overnight I clip the wires to length, strip the ends and solder the wires to the pads on the power pickup - no need to worry about polarity as the lighting board has a rectifier. Now the sneaky bit, instead of putting a resistor on the board I simply put a loco on the programming track, IMPORTANT: note the values of the CVs you want to change of the loco. Then, put the carriage on the programming track (mine has an ESU Lok Programmer and ESU Lokprogrammer 5.2.5 on the computer). You can then set the CVs for the coach. Afterwards do not forget to remove the coach then reset the CVs for the locomotive. I have 4 CFL long coaches but the length of my railway means I can only run 2 on 1 train, if the other 2 are in a siding and have a different CV1 then their lights will not come on when you set the coach lights to come on for the train. Incidentally I used a Dymo labeller to mark the coaches as CV1 = 1 and CV1 = 2 for each pair and put the label underneath the relevant coaches. This method seems to work, never seen any smoke so I too suspect you may have removed the red LEDs but left the wires which touched the live rails.
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