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Showing posts from June, 2021

Total Overkill - Controlling Diorama Lighting With A Microcontroller

I'm building a scenic model - a diorama indeed.  In fact this diorama is the reason I got interested in electronics in the first place. You see the model will have a few buildings & they'll all be lit with LEDs. There may also be some motorised gimmicks if I can get them to work. The problem was that I didn't know how to wire up LEDs, so hit Google and disappeared down an electronics rabbit hole. The original plan that was to have a simple set of circuits where each LED had a potentiometer to adjust the brightness along with a fixed resistor to protect the LED. The LEDs would be switched on and off using some slider switches that I got from an electronics surplus shop many moons ago. All would be powered from an old model railway 12V power controller I've had since I was a teenager. Yep, it's old! But that'd be too simple wouldn't it? So now I'm planning to electronicify it. Not that it needs doing of course, but it'll be more fun. The plan is to