Corvette no headlights

[Nat Santamaria]

I just purchased a CR6 Corvette and installed the 20763 Digital chip and about 10 laps of use the headlights stopped working. I have checked the chip at the soldered soldered joints. The tailights voltage reading was 1.77 volts, the headlight was reading a full 16.43 volts. Is there supposed to be a capacitor on the headlight board that reduces the voltage? I am trying to find out where the problem lies.

[KD11]

I don't have any 1/24 scale Carreras so I can't speak to what the voltage to the Headlight board would be. I have all 1/32 scale that use the 26732 modules. The voltage supplied from the 26732 is 4V to the headlight board , also there are 470 ohm resistors in series to each headlight led to further reduce the voltage. I believe 16V going to the headlight board seems high and would likely burn out the resistor or both headlight LED's. On one of my cars I did have one headlight led go out. Turned out to be a bad LED, I replaced it and now it works fine. You might closely look at the digital module for any bad solder joints or loose connections.
Good Luck :)

[goosenapper]

[Nat Santamaria]

I have a bad chip, the headlights are blown, car is going back. There is no capacitor on the headlight board. I believe the capacitor is soldered to the chip. I do not see capacitors on any of the headlight boards.

Thanks all

[dr fabio]

If you are reading 16V at the headlights then either the headlights have blown (and gone open circuit) or you have a bad solder joint, broken wire etc and that part of the circuit has gone open circuit. Replace headlights or find the continuity break.

[RichD]

Capacitors are not used to drop voltage, resistors are used to do that. If something has gone wrong so that full track voltage got applied to the light circuit it is unlikely that a resistor would get burned out, but the LEDs would be cooked for sure.Usually there are very small surface mount resistors and LEDs on the circuit boards and those would be difficult to replace. It would be much easier to replace the entire circuit board than to replace the LEDs. You would have to find the reason for a high voltage, if that is the case, before dealing with burnt out LEDs.
If the car was defective out of the box try to get a replacement. If you have to repair the car yourself and can't get replacement parts there is an alternative if you still want lights. Digital tracks operate at a constant voltage, so adding new lights would be a little easier than it would be for an analog track where the voltage is always changing. You would have to buy new LEDs and the appropriate dropping resistors. Red LEDs operate at 2 volts and white LEDs operate at 3.5 volts, so at least two resistors would be needed. You would have to measure the track voltage and get the amperage rating for both types of LED. There are online calculators to pick the right resistors.