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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.


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