The project has been quiet on Hackaday but we've been working away on finalising the electronic elements. We've been working to build the layout, settle on the scenery and, most importantly for electronics, settling on the number of LEDs required. We're estimating around 60 single LEDs across the whole table for lighting effects. This includes Street Lighting, Cars and individual LEDs inside the housing. Once that was settled, I went shopping;

The strip lighting LEDs will be used around the rim of the top of the table. This will give us ambient lighting that can be controlled via the web interface. At a later date we'll be able to add cool effects and automation such as day and night cycles, moon and sun cycles, and maybe some SciFi effects for fun. The rest of the LEDs will be inside the buildings for nighttime effects. The servos will give us control of the track allowing the trains to move onto different parts of the layout. LDRs will be used for lighting automation and the transistors are needed for controlling some of the higher voltage LED strings. Finally we have the Teensy LC for low level control and a nice I2C PWM board with 16 channels that can be used for providing the Servo and Single LEDs with power and PWM control. These boards seem really nice because we can reduce our pin requirements from over 60 devices to just a single 2 pin I2C bus. Each board can support 16 devices (LEDs and Sevos) and we can daisy chain up to 62 boards together. Thankfully we only require about 5...

17th of December is our wiring date. It's the day I'll be onsite with the build and we'll be putting all of the electronics together. The planning stages have been fun but I can't wait to get hands on.