Skip to main content

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 switch the lights on and off using an infra-red remote and to enable a pre-programmed sequences of lights to turn on and off.


That's going to need a microcontroller - probably an Arduino Nano clone. It's also going to need a few power transistors because there are far too many LEDs to power directly from the microcontroller.

It's likely I'll drop the supply voltage from 12V to 9V so as not to stress the voltage regulator that'll be needed to supply the microcontroller.

Maybe I'll use pulse width modulation to adjust the brightness of the LEDs instead of the pots.

Let's see how it goes, eh?

I'll write it all up on the diorama project page of my electronics website.


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Sort-Of-Theremin - Another Project?

Yep, even before getting anywhere near completing my first project I've got an idea for a second. In my defence, they're both related. The idea is to construct a Theremin-like instrument. Theremin-like because my idea uses a slightly different principle to control it. So, what's a real Theremin? Briefly it's an instrument that uses radio waves to deduce the proximity of the player's hands to two aerials: one that controls pitch and another that controls volume. It uses the capacitance of the human body to determine the hand's position relative to the aerials. There's much more info on howstuffworks . My idea is to use the same capacitive sensing as is planned for my first project, the Electro Tongue Drum . But, instead of detecting an actual touch on a key I'm hoping to use the fact that the metal sensor can detect the proximity of a finger or hand. While a real Theremin uses radio waves to detect the position of the player's hand mine w
Post a Comment
Read more

My 1st Project - Say Hello to the "Electro Tongue Drum"

The electro-what? If you've read my previous post you'll know I'm an amateur musician of sorts. I play guitar, fumble with keyboards and have a liking for weird and off beat instruments. Canjo anyone? One such instrument is the Tongue Drum (aka Tank Drum, aka Hank Drum). I fancied buying one, but a decent one isn't cheap, so I couldn't justify the cost given the small amount of use I'd have for it. But how about an electronic emulation of one? I got the idea when I was down the rabbit hole looking at lots of other peoples projects online. I stumbled across the paper piano project. The person who built this simply drew the keyboard on cardboard and filled in the keys with pencil "lead". Those "keys" were connected to a wire using a paper clip, of all things, and the wire was attached to an Arduino Uno micro-controller via a large value resistor. The Arduino can then sense when a finger touches one of the pencilled in keys and play a (horri
Post a Comment
Read more