Projects – Putting it all together

Light up boat

Gunfire from canons? And splash in water? Automate?

Ships gally?

Lamps

Back Lighting

By placing a light behind a lamp you can light it up easily, although in doing this you generally wont light up the area below the light like embedded a light.

You can experiment with various Lego bricks to see which reflect, refract or just cast light how you wish it to be.

Underside Lighting

You can carefully drill up the center of street lamps, or use technik flat plates to run larger wires for desk lights.

Pre made lights can be bought from varios retailers online if you prefer, then use wire hiding techniques to install them as mentioned before.

Hooks on the Walls for Wires

To guide wires you can use many different bricks, depending on how many and how thick your wiring is.

Single brick poles make good looking drainpipes, but either by themself or in a pair they work well to trap many wires in place.

[Picture of both]

Technic bricks are the obvious choice, but due to not all colours available in

[Pictures of 3 hole technic jutting out of wall]

Forest Cabin

Set 5766 “Log Cabin” was the basis for this model, which I built onto stilts and sat it on a larger blue base-board. I left spaces in the bottom of the hut to run wires out underneath the fisherman’s pier to light his lamp and the water around it.

I added elements from set 60066 “Swamp Chase,” a fisherman Minifig from the Series 3 collectors set and some clear plates from the Laser Pegs sets for the water, as it was easier to cover a larger area with them than standard Lego pieces.

I replaced the bricks behind the lamps either side of the door with headlight bricks to light them up, and just put LEDs directly onto the breadboard for the fireplace.

I used an Arduino Nano direct onto the breadboard as it was all that was needed for this simple setup. The code for it is based on the fade and flicker effects described previously.

[Overall Scene / Video]

[Under Pier]

[Breadboard in house]

[Bricks behind lamps]

[Fishermans Lamp]

Beach House

The first building I put a light in was the beach house, Lego

In years gone buy I’d played with the

Lego Shop

I was able to grab one of these limited edition models when the shop in the Blue Water shopping center in Kent opened.

Wanting to mimic the effect of fluorescent lights for this model, I used the technique described before.

I also added a vintage Lego translucent sign on the front in place of the standard opaque one.

[Video of lights coming on]

[Video of light on YouTube]

Car Lights and Sirens

Garden Plinth

My house

Using the Lego Architecture set (21050) I built a scale model of my house and installed lights connect to an Arduino with a Simm card adapter on it.

By sending text messages to the model I can switch lights on and off, and as text messages are free to receive on a Pay-As-You-Go Simm the only cost is, at time of writing, £10 for 6 months of service.

[House Picture]

[Shield Picture]

[Lights On Picture]

Modular Buildings

The lighting of my modular street was always going to be the end of my study in this area, as it would combine all of the things I have learnt and written in this book.

Lego themselves have many of these buildings, and many people have designed, built and posted pictures on the Internet of their creations that fit in with the style.

Modular buildings are built in sections that can be taken apart; the roof will come off and the buildings will separate. In lighting these I understood that in order to maintain this functionality I would need to be able to take the wires apart easily and my research to achieve that led me to the Dupont wires.