I’m trying to figure out how to light an 1885 layout. the lights would have to be dim and some would flicker. How would I acheive this effect? A campfire and blacksmith shop fire would be nice to see too.
I’ve got a arc welder circuit, but I don’t particulatly want to spend that much per building.
It might be cool to have an old West night scene.
what about some ofrm of a circuit that would, instead of just cutting power to the LED/lamp would dim it considerably, and perhaps some form of a randomness to it. Maybe 2-3 leds doing this in unison, but with some offset so one is bright and the other is dim, or they’re both dim (one is getting dim, and the other is getting bright)…
Chip,
Miniatronics makes a bulb/circuit board combo that has an amber light-flickering affect. I don’t think it’s as expensive as the arc welder one but it still maybe more than you want to spend. I thought it was in the $15-20 range.
Tom
Just checked Miniatronics site. It’s called Simulated Fire & Flame. MSRP: $23.95 ($6 cheaper than the arc welder kit.)
Dan,
Sounds like a senior-year diversion project for computer science majors to me…[:)]
Tom
you’re just jealous that I’m awesome like that.
The circuit shouldn’t be that hard… I was thinking like use a ditch lights type thing, but then wire in some capacitors so the LEDS dont’ shut off (they should just dim…)
being a CS major has no effects on my understanding (or lack thereof) of how to make electronics.
Chip,
Depend on me to be contrarian! In my experience, fires flicker (sometimes) but lanterns with chimneys burn with a fairly consistent (flicker-free) light until they are on the verge of fuel starvation. That typically yellowish kerosene light is what you get when you run small incandescent bulbs at half-voltage or so.
I’ve been using 2.5V Christmas lamps, four in series, powered by a 6.3V filament transformer. The light is a little too white for kerosene, but it has the right color value to represent typical 1960’s Japanese domestic lighting.
Chuck (modeling Central Japan in September, 1964)
http://www.hauntedillinois.com/lightflicker.php
Try this we had one in our yard haunt and it worked pretty well for flickering bulbs of a large scale not sure if it would work for a small light system or not
You are right of course, but that is not the whole picture. There would be lights from candles, oil lanps, stoves and fireplaces.
Interesting and inventive, but I think it would be larger than most of my structures.
Chip, I’ve heard that you could use an inexpensive radio, Remove the speakers, and solder Lightbulbs onto the speaker leads, and find a freq that is just static. I know there is more to it than that, I remember seeing in article in a back issue of MR or RMC or something like that. Maybe someone can enLighten us on this subject?
Sounds like a good application for some fiber optics
You could thread the individual fibers to different locations
and bundel them on the light source end
If the light source had a rotating color wheel
of white and yellow the tip ends of the fiber optic cable would change color
Intereseting idea. I’ll think about this one for a while.
I was going to make the same suggestion. Volume control adjusts voltage to the bulb and therefore brightness. You can control max brightness with a series resistor and parallel zeners (zeners in series back to back) of or below the bulb voltage. I would measure output with an RMS voltmeter to be safe. It’s going to take some experimentation. Also the radio may only put out a few watts of power. Don’t overload it.
Old transistor AM radio is probably best and hopefully cheap.
good luck,
Karl
Thanks Karl, I seemed ot have missed NS’s post. I would have to run several houses, etc. off one radio.
You could even decorate your trees at Christmas time
See this link
http://www.mountainvalleycenter.com/store/html/folamp.htm
All the parts you need including color wheels motors bulbs etc
http://www.fiberopticproducts.com/
I saw an article a long time ago where a guy made chase lights fo his
movie theater markee using this stuff
And no i don’t work for either company
Chuck is right.
EDIT… BUT JUST RECALLED… MINERAL OILS FOR LIGHT - KEROSENE - WOULD BE POST 1900!
SEE NOTES ADDED AT END OF THIS…
A blacksmiths fire would end to burn yellow-white except when the bellows were pumped when it would be boosted up to bright white. I guess that at some times it could die right down to orange. BUT a smith doesn’t work by forge light… either daylight or good lamplight.
I think that by 1885 there were good incandescent mantles for both gas and pressure parafin/kerosene lamps… can’t recall dates on this. (Wikepdia may come up with something on an “incandescent” search).
Incandescent mantle lights burn seriously white… and hot.
The other lights are plain wick (flat, round or circular) which burn yellow… which is why the “glass” in a signal aspect for green is actually blue… blue+yellow=green [:)] For light I think that only round and flat wicks are used (circular, wide flat and round are used for heating… usually behind mesh as the heat not the light wants to get out). Round wicks should burn wit
Before microchips and transistor circuits to flash lights, people used old tube-type radios. They connected a miniature light bulb to the radio’s speaker wires, tuned to a station that played rock music or had a lot of talk shows, and the radio’s amplifier would cause the bulb to flicker. I don’t think a transistor radio has enough power output for this use unless its output is fed through a secondary power amplifier. An audio amplifier should be able to serve the same function for more than one bulb.
Couple more thoughts [:O] (There’s a surprise)!
For old fashioned light you want not just the more yellow light but both pooled light and much less shadow.
With a lot less fuel and far fewer lights most of the time old style lighting struggled to compete with the natural darkness all round it. If you think about the old westerns the film makers built this into the plot when the good guys and bad guys moved from shadow to shadow. They would show up as silhouettes against light rather than be given away by the fall of a shadow 9as in a modern cop film…)
There would also be much, much less light pollution. Even the idea of not being able to see the stars on a clear night because of so much light would have been really weird to people.
We’re so used to modern hard, white light, masses of it and direction in artificial light. Next time you walk across a store’s parking lot look at the ground… you will have a sharply defined shadow, possibly shadows if the lot is lit from more than one side. One sided shadow will be pretty dark, multiple shadows will be washed out a bit by the light from other direction(s). This sort of thing just isn’t going to happen with old fashioned lighting… the light was so much less powerful and (except where there was a lens and, sometimes, a mirror behind the flame) the light was less directional.
Old light struggled out where and which way it could. We direct modern light and power it out where we want it so much we get spillage.
Hope this helps.
[8D]
Chip, I’m with C&Ofan here, only with a different twist to it. Fiber optic cable bundled as has been stated, but instead of a “color wheel”, routed to a couple of Xmas “twinkle lights”, say red and amber. They randomly blink on and off, with no set pattern. Use a non blinking amber bulb at a lower voltage that would keep a constant amber light showing when the blinking lights woud both be in an off cycle, and the blinking ligts would just give the effect of flickering. By Xmas lights, I mean the larger on that blink individually, not the small ones now popular. Ken
I think that this is the best “flickering” suggestion so far (Please don’t mis-read that). You may have noticed that I’m not going for a flicker effect at all. I have a couple of Busch pumper fire trucks with flashing LEDs… you don’t want to get anything like that effect. Maybe you should use two or even three non-blinking bulbs. [per each flicker bulb]. Whether these should be amber, some white and some amber or what I’m not sure.
I think that a huge risk is that we can all get into a modeller’s mind set that the light(s) would flicker and keep looking for solutions to that instead of considering other ideas. This is a similar risk to the problem we all so easily fall into when doing a track plan… we can get models we have seen and really liked so far into our heads that we don’t look at the real thing and we end up down a family tree of modelling models of models of models. Every so often we need to shake ourselves off and step outside the trainroom/workshop.
(Please note… I’m not being negative)
If you are using bundles of fibre optics it would be good to use fairly small bundles and both feed them to several points within a room to represen