The last word lighting system for mannequin railroaders

Go to any mannequin railroading conference and also you’ll see that the majority layouts have way more work put into the terrain and buildings than into the trains themselves. The emphasis is often on realism, so fans spend uncountable hours setting up and weathering their buildings. However lighting these buildings will be tough, main many individuals select easy static lighting. This challenge by Olivier Wagener makes it comparatively straightforward to improve that lighting to one thing far more refined.

Wagener began this challenge to assist his father enhance the lighting of a prepare station constructing for his mannequin railroad. The result’s actually spectacular, as a result of each room within the constructing has two of its personal LEDs: one a heat temperature and one a cool temperature. This additionally helps RGB LEDs. Utilizing a smartphone, the person can set the brightness, shade, and temperature of every room individually. They’ll additionally group these into zones for fast management. As soon as setup, the person has full management over the practical lighting and that provides a complete new dimension to mannequin railroading.

That is doable due to an Arduino MKR 1010 WiFi board that communicates with Wagener’s customized app over the native community. This could deal with as much as 976 single-color LEDs (heat or cool), 305 RGB LEDs, or some mixture of the 2. To offer the Arduino full PWM (pulse-width modulation) management over that many LEDs, Wagener selected PCA9685 PWM module boards. Every one has 16 channels, so a full set of 976 single-color LEDs would require 61 boards. 305 RGB LEDs can even require 61 boards, as a result of every of these LEDs takes up three channels.

If you wish to use Wagener’s challenge in your individual buildings, all the code and knowledge is out there on his Gitlab web page.