08 December 2011
By Michael
I found a pre-assembled shift-register board that did almost exactly what I had designed mine to do, for $20. After all the pain of trying to get my soldered, this was a big win - although I eventually realized that the problem might have been the batteries - they don't provide enough current to drive all the extra LEDs.
Christmas 2011
At this point, the controller is driving LEDs under 10 buildings, and will be driving the lights under at least two more. In addition, I whipped up some code that takes old Nokia RTTTL ring tones (circa 1997 or so) and plays one each hour that the set is powered up. It's a pretty crappy piezo buzzer, but that just leaves room for improvement next year when I build in the motor controller (ha!) and the MP3 player (ha! ha!)...I'll post pictures of the under-body with all the wiring if I get a chance. Click on the picture to see all the photos.