Hello All, I have challenge I need to light a 20 x 20 ft

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Hello All,
I have challenge I need to light a 20 x 20 ft room which will be used for a model railroad. I want to change the lighting to match a sped up clock for 24 hr running for trains.

What kind of LEDs would give me the brightness output and is there a formula for luma’s to fill a room ?

Thanks
Greg

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Neat idea. Easiest might be to just get a single dimmable LED bulb + arduino + PowerSSR + ZeroCross to make your own AC dimmer. Hard to know how much light you need for the effect. Would a 100W-equivalent bulb suffice?

I suspect it’d be difficult to create a “daylight” look just with LED pixels – you’d likely need hundreds. (By my uninformed googling, it looks like 100W incandescent ~= 1600 lumens ~= 250 WS2812 pixels at 6 lumens each ~= 15A max power draw.) The advantage there is that you could easily change the color temperature to simulate different times of day.

(Moving into impractical territory, it’d be cool if you could set up your light(s) on a track to move across the sky – but I think that’d make everything harder.)

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Hi @Jonathan_Spring , I like your suggestion of a moving sun across the ceiling and only imagine the effect on the miniaturised landscape, shadows and all…

For a 20’ X 20’ room, I would use at least the equivalent of 4 X 60 Watts incandescent bulbs as I think that a 60W bulb is a reasonable light source in a small 10’ X10’ room.

However if someone wants closer to a broad daylight illumination, he could easily go to a 4 X 100W equivalent or even more !!

Now to explore the moving sun idea, if you have the budget that normally comes with having a dedicated 400 ft² miniaturised train room you could design and build a number of parallel power LED strips (let’s say 5) that covers the 20’ ceiling length with a spacing of ~ 1’ between 10 W power LEDs (They are about 1$ a piece so only 100$ for the LEDs). The difficulty lies in the power distribution, the necessary heat sinking scheme and LED control but nothing impossible there !! :slight_smile:

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Some form of track arcing across the sky carrying 4x high-powered led clusters, PWM controlling the robot and powered via the track, control by Bluetooth.

Peasy :wink:

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With a device shooting a fine mist to randomly create rainbows !!! :wink:

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And you can’t have rainbows without unicorns!

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I am also int model railroading and I got into this whole LED thing because I wanted to simulate rain with leds like i had seen in a store window. Just what I needed a second expensive hobby. At any rate I’m thinking of using non-addressable led strips which are fairly cheap as auxiliary lighting. I have overhead lighting that I’m working on controlling through my train control panel.

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Thanks for all the great Ideas my daughter might like the Unicorns :slight_smile: I have a unfinished ceiling so anything goes at this point and power is not a issue I have 3 120v 20A lines run into the room for that. The plan as wot do some kind of sun rise to sun set lighting effect and Thunder and lighting so I will have to use addressable lighting.

I remember reading that the AP102’s are the brights LEDs at this time is this correct?

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What do you mean, they are the bright LEDs at this time ?

I have not used APA102 yet but do not believe they are brighter than let’s say the ws2812. However they are considerably faster.

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They both use the same led. The ws and apa designation refers to the controller chip, not the led.