Room lighting with RemoteSign

After 6 years, I decided to upgrade my layout room lighting so that I could also control it from the layout software.

I wanted to be able to dim the room lighting automatically so that sunrise and sunset sequences could be done smoothly. Until now I had to manually adjust the dimmers of three lighting circuits which was somewhat tricky.

Purchasing digitally controlled lighting would have been prohibitively expensive and furthermore I was not prepared to remove the existing LED strips from the ceiling above the layout. I decided to implement digital access to the lighting by adding electronics where the existing lights obtained their power and were controlled by the dimmers.

I have four circuits:

• Warm white ceiling lights - drawing about 3.5 Amps at full power.
• Cool white ceiling lights - drawing about 5 Amps at full power.
• Mountain backdrop lights  - drawing about 2.7 Amps at full power.
• Hidden area lighting  - on/off - which draws about 3 Amps.

I decided to use an ESP8266 NodeMCU processor to control the lights. This is a small processor about 1" x 2" in size and can be bought for less than $5. It is capable of connecting to WiFi and has a number of outputs that can be used for the lighting, but these outputs are only 3.3V and only capable of 12mA, so those logical level outputs had to be fed to some components that amplify the signals and drive the high current load of all the lights.

I also found some technology called Blynk which includes the ability to easily create an app that runs on mobile devices and can 'talk' to the ESP8266, thus providing a handy visual interface to control the lights. Here is what my Blynk app for the lights looks like:

A new floor

As the ice melted from one of the longest winters in memory, water started seeping through the basement walls and pooling on the floor under the train layout.

It was a lot of work moving carpets out of the way, drying those that got wet and preventing the water from coming in.

Once we got it all dried out I saw someone selling the contents of a dance studio and I asked if they were also selling the floor mats - they were, and so I bought 800 sq feet of used flooring.

Again, it was  a lot of work moving everything about to access the entire floor but it progressed well.

Re-sprayed haze

I found that I had sprayed the 'Horizon haze' lighter sky color a little too low so I did another pass - making it higher this time.

I also painted the new column that replaced a rusty one...

Sky painted

I sprayed the backdrop walls a nice blue that I selected. The person at the counter said I would probably only need half a gallon but I thought that was not going to be enough so I bought a whole gallon of a color that Behr calls 550B-5 Windjammer.

I have a paint sprayer so I spent the whole day covering stuff in the area with tarps and fastening masking boards on the sides to prevent over-spray. I started painting at 6:20 PM and within about 40 minutes I had used up the whole gallon of paint. This is mostly because I also decided to spray as much of the ceiling as possible too.

Ready to start spraying..

Room preparation

The first step was to move everything that was against the walls, away.  

Room lighting with LEDs

In the time since I prepared the room for my previous layout, LED technology has advanced tremendously. I found however that LED light fittings were rather expensive if one wanted to cover 450 square feet so I looked for an alternative.....

I found that one can now buy a roll of LED strip lights 5m (16') long and I tried some out, liked the result and then formed a plan to illuminate the layout area with dimmable LED strips.