Machine Lighting
So, I'm trying to get a jump on the holidays. Well... it started with wanting to mess with ballast track building, which segued into ballast track with snow, which morphed into all that passing through a snow-covered mountain. Which took me to a LEGO Ideas set that, woefully, had a mere ~480 votes that incorporated a secret Santa workshop into the mountain, and... anyway...
To light the toy-making machine in the workshop, I'm thinking a red and green pico (or cool whites under the colored piece; I'm torn), but none of the lighting effects feel quite... right. (Like the one found in Santa's Workshop # 10245, below.)
Thinking almost a pattern like a 2:1 ratio of light "on" timing of one channel over the other... there's patterns that are close (prototype railroad crossing, ditch lights without the slow fade-out), a few of the effects in the 12-pattern LEC (like pulse, but not a 50/50 on/off). Y'know?
(And yup, I've accepted the light piece themselves may need a drill to get light through the modified tile light holder, or switch up the lights style to round plates or even the domes similar to what's on the Ninjago City radio tower, pn# 4773...)
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Hi Paul, so you're looking for one light to be on for, say, 1 second while the other flashes on/off in that same time?
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Rob Klingberg Y'know, I don't know that I have a super solid idea of it all... been forever and a day since I got to take a tour on an assembly line (Jelly Belly, Hershey, what have you).
My first thought was, say, channel 1 is on for one "X" (second, half second, whatever), and channel 2 is off for that same duration, then a crisp switch over to channel 1 being off for twice the "X" interval while channel 2 is on. In my noggin, like a short-cycle traffic light interval of machine processing ('long' red cycle), then machine complete ('short' green cycle).
But could be I'm over thinking it, and any of the other LEC patterns would work - the only reason I went down this rabbit hole is it seems most are very balanced in on-vs-off time between the two channels...
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Rob Klingberg that’s in the ballpark, and toss in some love for a second channel.
I s’pose I could just do two blinking white picos under the green and red and call it— just thought it could be fun to have some sync between the two (but not a balanced 50/50 pattern, say)... which is when i opted against the antenna LEC.
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Paul George I was thinking the blinking Picos as well-- if only because they would reduce the cost of the overall setup so much vs. needing to use a LEC. The caveat would be that you'd need to do more drilling to hollow out the bottom of the jumpers and the stud immediately below them to fully conceal the Pico LED, but overall it would be a simple setup.
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Rob Klingberg And some drilling was likely inevitable. I'll give that a whirl and see where it takes us. Thank you!