PlateLayer by Svein-Martin Holt

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)