PlateLayer by Svein-Martin Holt

The last days I have build many of the background skyline high-rise buildings using images of the fasades, photoshop to adjust the images, my laser printer, glue and foamboard. Added also some plaster rocks. Starting to looking better. In the back, you can see a model of the Metrolitan Tower in Chicago.

There have been a lot of progress installing the different streetsurfaces and the tunnelportals for the road. I have also started to install the basement foram for the church and the back part of the layout. Still much to do, but I start to see the city.

Kind of sad day today. Because of lack of space, I have thrown many of my modules into the dust bin. Hours, weeks, months and years with happy modelling and a good time  are thrown into the dust containers. The different modules includes the Bjørkli Viaduct build in 1989, and 2 ZMOD modules, like Saguaro River Module. The only module I have saved is the newest, the Silver Creek Module. And of course, the new build, Zity Edge Layout.

For the main lighting of the layout, I have installed a total of 7 LED-strips, 3 with Warm White LED's and 4 with adresseable RGB(W) LED's. The extended number of white strips gives a bright light as possible.

All strips are controlled using an Arduino microcontroller, where the 3 Warm White strips are controlled with pulse width modulation(PWM) and a IRF540 MosFet driver card, and the 2 RGB strips are controlled with the FASTLED library available for the Arduino. 2 more Led strips are installed a RGB-strip on the East Mountain backdrop and a 150 pixel RGBW, 17x9 pixels matrix are installed as a skyboard to simulate different colors and pattern, like sunrise, lightning and Aurora Polaris. On this homemade LED-matrix using a standard 5 meter long RGBW-strip(description will follow soon), I use the Adafruit NeoMatrix library. The initial tests look promising. I will come back with images soon. The programming are not finished and need further development.

The goal is to create animations that can simulate day, sunrise/sunfall and night. And some lights effecs, like ligthing strokes with sound and other visual effects. All controlled by a fastclock and swithes connected to the Arduino. Since I plan to run JMRI on a RaspBerry Pi, I am thinking about to create the userinterface on the RaspBerry Pi, connected to the different Arduinos on the Layout. The Arduino is so cheap to buy, so it will be easier to use several Arduinos for different tasks.

The different LED-stripes:(Table is under construction)

A test with an animation of the LED-strips behind the mountain backdrop. The current colors in the video are just to test to see how it could be. All lights are run by an Arduino microcontroller. I guess I need to use some time to develop the programs for the Arduino. The LED-strip in the video is a 144 RGB leds/meter, adressable WS2812B strip, with a total of 235 LED's.

Some more progress on the building of the new layout. Skyboard and mountain backdrop are installed.

The lights for the layout room and backdrop, are done using several LED-strips. For the overall white daylight, I have used 3 Warm-White LED-strips, for the colored lights, I have installed 2 adressable RGB-strips, one for the overall light, and one behind the mountain backdrop.