Layout Lighting for a new layout space in the basement - suggestions wanted (pictures on page 3)

[rrinker]

There are non-computer 'scene controllers' from Leviton for X-10 protocol that allow you to doa lot of the computer stuff without an actual computer, although it is probably FAR easier to just use a computer. A cheap old one is sufficient.

Stay away from the actual X-10 products though. They work, and are cheap, but the dimmers are NOT suited for a real scene control. X-10's dimmers, if int he off state and you want them to light up at, say 25% brightness, come on FULL and dim down to the commanded setting.

Leviton's dimmers do NOT have this problem.

I've toyed with this idea for my layout as well, wiring in a series of Leviton dimmers to control outlets in which I plug various strings of C9 christmas tree lights, strings of white, blue, and red. I already have the X-10 computer interface and software, I control lights all over my house with it.

[jhugart]

Yes, www.smarthome.com is the place to go. Their products are very nice, and they are good at identifying other products that can handle things. However, it took me a while to wrap my head around how X10 works and which products I would need. Their on-line question-and-answer process is very nice, though.

I think, once I get this going, I'll draft an article for MR (maybe the NMRA, too) on using X10 to control layout lighting.

Yes, there are ways to do it using scene control, but you need dimmers that have fade rates you can set, and you don't have the same degree of flexibility as you do with computer control.

[bsteel4065]

Hi jhugart
I'm in the process of ripping out my layout and starting again. I have always wanted to have a full dawn to dusk with dimmers in fast time. I'm talking to the UK supplier of X10 at www.simplyautomate.co.uk who is very helpful. I'm looking at blue lights and red lights in the East and the same in the West. I'm using spotlights (not flourescent) in seperate groups above the layout. With programmed dimmers, the blue are on for night and all the spotlights are off. (I have lights in buildings.) The red dims up in the East and the blue dim off. The spots dim up in groups from east to west. After a 'day' the spots fade, the west red lights come up, the spots fad to off and the blue lights in east and west fade up.
Love to know how you get on. Interesting to note rrinker's comments on Leviton dimmers though. I'll keep you posted how I do. (But I shall be building benchwork first so it won't be for a while.) Good luck.

[jhugart]

OK, I've placed my orders with smarthome.com (for the X10 control stuff) and tracksource.com (USA Lights seems to be a reputable dealer for track lighting, has colored MR16 lamps, and is cheaper than Home Depot). I went to Home Depot earlier tonight and got all the other stuff I need for my basement electrical work.

Once I get this all in place, I'll take some pictures and post them. Here's hoping I get something done by Thanksgiving!

[ahuffman]

There's nothing new under the sun. In the late 1940s, Model Railroader published a series called "From Pillar to Post" about an S gauge layout in California. One of the articles described the sun machine which consisted of a saltwater rheostat driven by a motor (old locomotive) which controlled the incandescent lights including a sunrise/sunset effect. A series of home-made contacts and segmented metal disks on one part of the mechanism controlled lighting in buildings. The water rheostat electrodes had different tapers to cause the daylighting to fade before the sunset and come on bright after the sunrise. Best of luck on your venture. I'm looking forward to seeing the photos.

[bsteel4065]

Hi jhugart
Great news. Let us know the outcome. PLEASE!

[TBat55]

Yesterday HMinky posted this on this forum. It made me think more about shadows.

I have a webpage discussing my attempts at directional layout lighting:
http://www.pacificcoastairlinerr.com/4x8/lighting/
Thank you if you visit
Harold

[jhugart]

All the lighting stuff arrived last week. At the moment, I just completed a workbench for the basement. (The old one was original to the 1930 house, but given how it was attached to the basement wall, congenital might be a better term!) This allowed me to sort out all the tools I have, so I can get what I need as I fini***he wall treatment and install the lighting.

But everything arrived as it should. I'm reading the manual on the Indigo software (the X10 control software for the Mac OS X environment). I'll keep people informed!

[bsteel4065]

Hi jhugart
Good news. When you're ready, let us know about the dimmers!

[jkeaton]

I could be wrong, but I think John Allen's Gorre and Daphetid had a day-night sequence to its lighting - complete with a moon that "rose" over the layout. If I recall correctly, he used some sort of motor-driven sequence dimmers and multiple lighting circuits to create the effect. Probably not a practical approach for today, but still inspirational that it could be done with 1960s technology.

[jhugart]

OK, the lighting arrived; here’s what I’ve done.

I installed four 4 ft. tracks for track lighting thusly:

1. One track, a few inches from the back wall, is for blue lights. There are two fixtures on this track, but it needs a third. This is for fill-lighting and general night lighting.

2. Another track about four feet from the back wall, for white light. There are four fixtures on this track. This is daylight.

3. One track, about six inches closer to the back wall than the white light track, is shift two feet to the left. There is a single, yellow light at the extreme left end of the track. This is for western light.

4. A second track, similar to #3 but shifted two feet to the right, with a single fixture at the extreme right end of thr track. This is another yellow light. This is for eastern light.

All tracks are line-voltage. All fixtures have integral transformers to drive low-voltage lamps. All fixtures have a tilt-swivel adjustment so you can point the lamp in practically any direction you need. All fixtures have barn doors for masking the light off unwanted areas.

All lamps are low-voltage, 50 watt MR16 halogens with a flood beam spread. The colored lamps use dichroic filters. (Dichroic filters are glass, and reflect unwanted colors instead of absorbing them as transparent plastic filters or theatrical gel colors do; this makes them last longer.) I had purchased two red lamps, but the results were hellish. Maybe I'll save them for Halloween.

Each track is controlled by a Smarthome SwitchLinc dimmer switch that can handle up to 600W of power. (This means I could have up to ten lamps controlled by a given switch, with room to spare…always a good idea to prevent overheating or otherwise overloading the switch.) The dimmers are X10 devices, but even without X10 programming, you have eight levels of lighting in addition to off. I've set the switches to change level over five seconds.

I have a KeypadLinc, 8-button X10 keypad by the dimmer switches. This is so I can set the initial look and time of day (Midnight, dawn, noon, dusk) and the cycle time (2 hours, 3 hours, 2 minute demo), as well as an All Off button.

My Macintosh has the Indigo home control software for X10 systems, and a PowerLinc module to connect the computer's X10 signals to the home electrical system. It will receive commands from the KeypadLinc and send commands to the dimmers.

(For those who don't know, X10 is to household lighting as DCC is to model railroad control. X10 sends a signal down the powerline, just like DCC does. Each X10 device either sends or receives information, and that usually includes an address and a command, just like DCC. The only real difference is that X10 is controlling lights and appliances, and gets information from motion detectors, temperature sensors, etc.)

I did not get the X10 devices programmed. There's usually a thirty-second window between when you put the device into programming mode, and when it 'listens' for an X10 address to adopt. I am not fast enough up the stairs from the basement to the second floor computer room, apparently.

When I installed the X10 switches, I used extra-deep boxes. I could see the value in having something deeper or taller, with a plate that provides a smaller opening for standard switch screws. There's a lot of wires involved, and the dimmers are big.

Even without programming, you can use them as regular dimmer switches, so I was able to check different levels and scenarios. I can definitely get the effects I wanted for any given time of day; all I need to do is to figure out the brightness levels for those times, and program them into the Indigo software.

There are some challenges to be faced, though:

1. Color. I bought the red lamps thinking I'd need them for sunrise and sunset; since then, I've actually looked at sunlight at different times of day. Daylight is either white or amber, at most; it is the sky that goes crazy with reds, oranges, purples, and such. Indirect light during the day is the pale blue of a blue sky, but diffuse.

2. Cyclorama. The current layout is more of a skill-builder for scenery, and wasn't designed with any backdrop in mind. If I were to add one, it would have to handle the colors from night to sky blue, with the orange-to-red-to-purple in the 'east' or 'west.' Probably the best way would be some sort of stretched or stiff scrim -- a loose-woven cloth that looks opaque when light shines on it from the side you are viewing it, but is transparent when something on the other side of it is lit and the front lighting is off. Bright LEDs or halogens shining up from the bottom would create the right effect, and small LEDs, fiber optics, or Christmas lighting could function as stars behind the cyclorama for night time.

3. Angles. The current layout is non-specific in terms of which way is north. It is also wider than I plan my modules to be. (My planned layout is a modular layout of copper mining in the Portage Lake area of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.) So I set up the lighting in a straightforward way.

But for the modules, there are at least three different orientations for the scenes I’m planning. For example, the yard area in the real geography runs north-south, so in a module you'd be facing west as you worked the yard. This means that the white light would come from the left, the blues from the right, dawn is behind you, and dusk/sunset is in front of you, at the back of the module.

Since I can get tracks for lighting in lengths as small as two feet, I'm kind of tickled at the idea of having multiple modules, with the same lighting changes, but from the appropriate angles. It would be different, but might help with the sense that you are operating a railroad in an actual environment, not just a basement.

Anyway, I'll post again when I get the X10 address programming done, and have my levels adjusted for the hours. I will try and videotape the sequence and post a link to a Quicktime movie.

After that, I'll focus on the layout scenery for a while, but when I get to the model buildings, I want to try an automatic lighting scheme that will run on the same cycles as the 'daylight.' That should be a challenge.

[jhugart]

I've got the lighting installed, and I'm fine-tuning the control. Here's what I've learned so far:

First, I didn't need to get colored lamps. The dichroic filters are nice, but in the case of yellow, there's color variation. I've stopped by the local magic and costume shop and picked up some Roscolux filters (*** Amber and No-Color Blue) to use for the sunrise/sunset lighting and shadow fill/night lighting. I plan to tape the filters to the barndoors. We'll see if it works.

Second, I made a mistake on placing my breakers, which prevented me from programming all my X10 devices. When I realized the problem and changed the breaker panel configuration, everything was fine.

Third, I learned of a limitation on programmatic control of an X10 dimmer switch. You can configure a dimmer switch so that it has a ramp time for going from full brightness to off and vice versa. I set this time to be about 5 seconds, thinking that a level change would be well-concealed by the ramp time. It turns out that the ramp time is ignored when you are sending a command to set the dimmer to a specific level (like 30%). It only works for on or off.

The workaround is to do the level changes in the program, but that may be more complicated; I'm looking into different ways of doing it.

As a test, though, the overall look is neat, even though you have these sudden level changes. And that's using the original filtered lamps, not gelled instruments. When I get back from Christmas travel, I'll take some pictures and maybe some video.

One thing I would have done differently, since I'm mounting tracks directly on the ceiling joists (this is the basement, so they are really floor joists for the first floor), is to use shorter tracks for anything at the 'ends' of a module, and angled them instead of putting blocks between the joists in order to keep things perpendicular. I'll take photos of this arrangement too, to explain what I mean.

Think the editors of MR would be interested in an article on this?

[jhugart]

Had Steve come over this weekend, and he was awed by the lighting changes in the basement. Remember, I went from occasional pull-chain lights to a bunch of fluorescents, with computer-controlled track-lighting for the layout.

Steve helped me reprogram the keypad (SmartHome KeypadLinc, 8-button version). I'd had problems where the signals sent by the KeypadLinc didn't seem to make it to the Mac running the Indigo controlling software.

What I did was change the nature of the buttons from non-toggle to toggle. In non-toggle mode, the buttons are supposed to send the same command each time. In toggle mode, two different commands are sent, depending on whether the button is already 'off' or 'on.' I reprogrammed the buttons to act in toggle mode.

This way, they do send a signal that Indigo receives. It takes a bit for Indigo to process the command, apparently. When I hit the button to bring up the midnight lighting, it takes about four seconds for that to start ramping up.

Steve agreed with my opinion that the blue-filtered lamps were too blue, and the yellow-filtered lamps were too greenish-yellow. I showed him the gels I got, and we agree that they should look better.

My plan is to tape the gels to the barndoor frames with electrical tape. This way it won't interfere with the barndoor operation. The barndoors friction-fit into the lighting instrument's hood, but they doesn't mean they don't get loose. I tried using a small-point nail set to deepen the bumps in the barndoors, and that seemed to work.

I need to purchase some 50W 12V halogen lamps, though, since I don't have enough to replace the colored lamps I have. For amusement, I showed Steve the red-filtered lamp, and Thomas (my 4-yr-old son) thoroughly enjoyed the look. He called it the "Volcano light," since it is a saturated red. He wants me to use it more often.

The sequencing in demo mode by the computer isn't bad, but the filter colors work against it. I'm going to change the coloring around first.

Another thing, we're going to investigate and see if we can have some AppleScript to make a smooth level change.

And lastly, I think the 4' width of this layout is problematic. In future, any modules or sections for my "real" layout will be no more than 2.5 feet deep.

[jhugart]

Finally! pictures of all this lighting stuff I was talking about.

Unfortunately, my wife has the digital camera, so I had to use the 640x480 progressive still mode on my DV camcorder. Eh. I tried to correct as little as possible, just putting the brightness up by 15 points in Photoshop so that Windows users wouldn't see things as a dark mass.

OK, you'll find the pictures in the http://www.hugart.net/layout/ directory. In order, they are:

lights-1-midnight.jpg - this is the blue "night" lighting at a very low level. The image is dark, but your eyes adjust when you are there. Just imagine this with some lighting from buildings, campfires, etc.



lights-2-dawn.jpg - Bump the blues up a touch and add in the single instrument way out to the right as dawn. Look at those shadows! Notice how it brings out the strata in the eroded bank of Dropkin creek!



lights-3-noon.jpg - Full daylight. The dawn light is off, the ungelled track lights are on full, and there's only enough blue to fill in the shadows.



lights-4-dusk.jpg - The sun sets, sending gold rays into the valley. Notice how this is different from dawn.



lights-5-fluor-as-int.jpg - This is what the layout looks like under the fluorescent lights when the camcorder was using interior lighting mode.



lights-6-fluor-as-ext.jpg - Same view, only with the white balance set to exterior lighting, which is normally blue, so you get a warm cast, but it is the same fluorescent lighting.



lights-7-fixtures-fluor.jpg - This is a shot of the 'ceiling' of the basement, where you can see the fixtures. Right now, the fluorescent strips -- the work lights -- are one.



lights-8-fixtures-track.jpg - Same as the last shot, but with the track lighting up, and the fluorescents off.



Later on, when I get the levels set, I'll tape the two-minute demo sequence so you can see the transitions.

[rrinker]

I think I mentioned this before - the dimmer switches from Leviton, which naturally are MUCH more expensive than the X10 ones, allow starting at 0 and ramping up, to ANY level. The X10 ones, if you say "light to 50%" jump to 100% and then back down to 50%. All of course within the limits of the number of steps supported by the X10 protocol.

--Randy

[jhugart]

The SmartHome switches don't go to full brightness and then dim to the level you want; they properly transition from whatever level they are at to the level you set. The difficulty is the ramp rate: the time it takes to fade from one level to the next.

[kathymillatt]

Wow!!

I am majorly inspired by the results. My layout has 14 fluorescent tubes but nothing else yet.

It looks like your layout is already built. As I am totally broke at the moment (I have just finished the benchwork and bought tonnes of track!!), could you add all these things after the layout is finished or is it definitely a no go?

Thanks again for showing the results.

Kathy

[jhugart]

This layout is hardly built...what you see is paint and ground foam over plaster. There's no trees or buildings.

Adding track lighting afterwards isn't a problem as long as you can get into position. This layout is small, so I could just rotate it out of my way, walking it elsewhere, so I could get a step-ladder in to install the tracks and such. The worst-case for an installed layout would be something against the walls, then you couldn't get any lighting in that area easily.

Gah, I'm looking at these pictures from work, where I have a PC, and the gamma is all wrong. Here's how you can see these pictures in something like the original glory:

1. Save a picture to your computer. (Right-click on it and do a Save Picture As...)

2. Open the Microsoft Photo Editor application. Mine came with Office 2000.

3. Open the picture from within Microsoft Photo Editor. (Double-clicking the .jpg file may open something else.)

4. From the Image menu, select Balance... . The Balance window displays.

5. Adjust the Gamma slider to change the value from 1 to 1.79. This is closer to the original image.