An Electronic Billboard for N Scale Model Railroading #models #FromTheForums #Adafruit @Adafruit
From the Adafruit Forums, user modeller has posted some great photos and information on their model railroading efforts.
Hey all – been gone for a few years but recently ordered a box o’ parts from Adafruit. What I’m making now is an electronic billboard for the side of the road like you can see nowadays along the highways. I’m using a Nano, an RGB OLED, a real time clock, and a TMP36 temp sensor – because one of the displays sequences will show the real time and temperature! It will be cycling through about ten “ads” for different things like public safety and product ads.
It so happens that the tiny OLED is about the right size for an N scale (1:160) billboard. So far I’m making good progress. After the electronics is nailed down, I’ll make it more permanent and I’ll have to make a scale billboard stand for the OLED and run the wires down from the top of the layout to the Nano under the table.
So, after some considerations I decided to simply add a button switch, an additional LED, and some code that will indicate that DST has been activated. The RTC time is set up to “normal” time (non-DST). All the button does is sense a press, sets a boolean variable, and adds an hour to the displayed time until you want to end DST. The DST true or false variable is stored in eeProm so when powered on it will read the value back and continue to add the hour. When DST is ended in your area you simply go under the table again and press the button until the LED goes off, and the time goes back to “normal” time until the next time DST comes around. Simple and it works.
By the way, here’s my tribute to Adafruit which will be one of the ads cycling on the electronic billboard. I would make an Adafruit show room too but if you actually go 10 scale miles you’d fall off the edge of the world LOL.
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