Karl was right, thanks man!

old


new!

Hi Bameraam!

The new pillars look so much better!

Your lighting system is well above my capabilities, I think it's great!

I'm looking forward to the next update, as this is definitely one of those diaries people need to keep checking on! Lots of good info!!!

Darron

Thanks all for the kind words

reading the book i bought, there seemed to be gratings on the second deck as well (as stair cases too)

So been working on these almost all day, had some try-outs before i came to the following:

Milled my own strips of 1x3mm grating planks so they interconnect as the ones provided by DeAgostini. I found the ones provided not good enough, and added to that, the normal instructions don't include gratings to be present on the 2nd deck. Also, the box-like enclosure for the cannon balls really diminish the appearance of them, so here they are more visible.
As a frame for the grating i used 3x3mm nutt wood, milled with a ball-shape cutter to get a curve & the "slots" for the cannon balls (2mm center-center)
Tomorrow i'll check where to place them & finish the sanding & giving them a coat of stain:





Best regards,
Bam

Excellent build!! I agree with you there Jase...

Hi folks,

Been a while since i did an update here, sorry.
Have been working mostly on some hull planking & at the midsection finishing & lighting. Leaves me still to put a mild varnish on it, and maybe add 2 more LED at the entrances themselves. Find them a little too dim to my liking..

Thanks for checking & happy holidays to all
Best regards,
Bam

fantastic work love the lighting effects

Looks awesome, I can't wait to see this when its completed.

Regards

Craig

Hi Vik...

Great build diary, lots of detailed work.

best regards,
Ian

Hey everyone,

Still working even though updates don't come that often.
Been working on the firmware of the controllers, and it's (finally) done now.

What has been lacking inside the model, was the controller PCBA, so here that is.
The firmware was debugged on a debug PCBA i made. Basically what it does is:
Serial Port Computer -> Master PIC (on these pictures) -> I²C protocol -> Slave PIC controller -> LED output.
And a whole list of available commands to send, the most important are:
- When you press "," on the keyboard, all the white LED will flash with a certain "cannon-fire" sequence. For the remainder all white LED's are off (for now)
- Each slave PIC (previous pictures) has 15 LED's on its pins. These can either be white ones or yellow ambient LEDs. Each pic also has some EEPROM memory inside (255bytes), so i use this space to program 'presets'. This will allow, when selected (keyboard O, P, Q, ....), to light up only certain area's of the vessel. For example 'captain's cabin' or lower deck, etc
- When pressing "+" or "-" (after selecting a target LED), i can tweak the LED brightness from 0-255. And also store it to a certain 'preset' EEPROM location. (EEPROM values are still present even after powerdown) This will allow me to finetune all the lights to the needed output level for all the places they're located. Play with shadows a bit, ...
- There are some demo modes also: All On/Off/On/... running light, dimming up loop, dimming down, all off, all max on etc etc
- After all electronics are inthere, there is no way to know which LED is wired to which pin of which slave PIC.. so added some commands (keys 0-1-2-....) that will briefly flash an LED 5 times so i see where it is (and can program it with + -)
- One EEPROM location also contains a global dimming value, which is broadcasted to all slave PICs (no need to go to each slave individually to do so), allowing with 1 command to dim the whole boat equally
- Some other code as well, mainly debug commands..

This took me quite a while to program & get to know the PIC devices, so the woodwork was on hold for all that time. Planning to continue that now :)

Best regards & sorry for the late update
Bam