my indoors layout is in a large room with just two windows.
being a two-storey layout, the lower deck is practically a row of dioramas.
while the upper deck will be lighted well enough by the tubes under the ceiling, the lower deck is very much in the shadows.
well, for me, being a sloppy modeller, a bit of shadows is an advantage. small mistakes and unclean modelling is less noted.
that brought me to the decision, to model the 19th of september 1866 at ten minutes before sunset.
ehem. i am weird, but not that weird. so, strike out the year, month and the day. but keep the ten minutes before sunset.
so what i was looking for was a lighting , that is light enough to show my buildings and figures, but not so bright, to expose my faults.
my decision fell on christmas lightchains to be hung every yard or so from the ceiling(floor of the upper deck) of the layout.
who does not know the time consuming task of finding the burnt-out bulb in such a chain?
but i got lucky. while i still was braining about how to design some kind of removable holding device a friend of mine, an electrician, came to me with some plastic sticks, telling me, they were the solution to my lighting problem.
he had imported some LED stripes for a customer, who wanted indirect light in a room.
the leftovers he gave to me for playing around.
the things have the name of wetelux, are made in germany, come two 1 ft. stripes per pack.
they run on 12 DC. 80 mA / 0.96 W each.
they are like lego. one can join any number of sticks together. (either directly or with some connector cables included),
when connecting more than five of the things in series, i noted a slight loss in brightness.
to keep the story short, we imported 20 pack for me, and i set them up.
two feeder cables, on each four strings of four LED-sticks in series.
the two feeders are connected to one of my modified computer powerpacks.
(for those interested, here is the how to:
http://www.wikihow.com/Convert-a-Computer-ATX-Power-Supply-to-a-Lab-Power-Supply )
i mounted them in some cable channels, to get a shadow effect, that does leave one side of each building or tree shadowed. (i dislike shadowless modelscenes.)
(with the rest i set up a testing system to evaluate, if i can use them with 12 V car batteries for emergency lights in my store)
