Modern electronics are opening up new possibilities for miniature displays. MIKE LOMAX explains how he installed a working LED matrix screen into a ‘OO’ scale double-decker bus.
Above: The screen can be loaded with different destinations through a USB socket in the rear of the vehicle. The Enviro 400 from Northcord displays its Hornby Magazine logo outside Topley Dale station.
With my previous background being in IT and always tinkering with Wgadgets and gizmos I recently turned my hand to Arduino development boards, LED screens and the programming that makes them work.
Over the past years I’ve spent a fair amount of time looking at how technology can be integrated into the model world to bring more realism to models. It is a complex subject, so this feature is more of an overview to introduce it.
Recently, my earlier collections of model buses came to light after a sort out. This gave me an idea to look at a project I’d been working on to see if I could get a working LED Matrix Screen into a 1:76 scale double decker bus to suit positioning on a ‘OO’ gauge model railway. It turns out that you can.
I’m using Arduino microcontroller boards and associated software which allow creation of unique electronic projects based around stan…
