Outstanding job on making the Motel 6! I believe you thought of everything to make this realistic as possible. Again you have outshined yourself with another fantastic looking model. I tip my hat to you!
Why are you using 0402 for the interior lighting? You could 1206 for that. It would spread the lighting around a little more to. You didn’t use the copper foil strips for distribution. Classic motel, perfect look. Next, apartments. Like the one at Niles. For that harder side of town.
I had hundreds of the 0402 warm white LED's on hand. What I like about them is I can run them off 2 milliamps and get a realistic light intensity, like a scale bedroom light, and they have super thin 36 AWG stranded wires that is easy to deal with for me. The best part is how easy they are to mount with UV Glue, I just hold the wires down to the surface of the material, and the LED sits in a hole to project light through to the other side. Add a dab of UV Glue, and while holding the wired down slide under the UV light for a couple seconds and the glue is set, and you can strip the insulation off the wires without worrying about pulling the wire off the LED, everything is set in epoxy essentially.
I'm building another Motel 6 for a sweet trade, and for this one they wanted interiors in rooms with the opened curtains. So it takes a couple days to wire up the rooms for microcontroller controlled lighting, but it has proven to be a fun effect. On this one, I did a slightly neater job, but the whole job is done under high magnification. The Digispark end is a USB port, for size reference, and the five red 38 AWG wires go to 4 pack SMD Resistor Arrays each. I sealed everything in UV Resin after testing so I would not break or short any wires while moving on the room interior detailing: Here you can see some of the first floor details in rooms where the curtains are opened, The lobby is to the left, and you can't see it well, but there is a guy buying a soda from the coke machine. There will be more lobby details added: And here is the second floor details on this side. The sofa's, beds, and entertainment stands were made by Clyde on his 3D printer.
The rooms are looking great with the furnishings! Very impressed with all the wiring you have done for the motel!
Been following this build, and the end results are incredible. Thanks for sharing many of your techniques.
Excellent looking motel! Great job on making the motel. Like all the details you did in putting this together! Again you have out did yourself on this one! Looking forward to seeing your next project!
Well, I have to build one more for myself before I move on to the Taco Bell. But the signs are going to be the 1960's cloverleaf logo. This one next: And this model afterwards:
Looking forward to seeing another style Motel 6 at the early part of their chain. The Taco Bell will look great once you have that done as well. Always a pleasure to see what you come up with!
These little guys are 10 for $22 on Amazon, much cheaper, although larger than the Digispark at 1.75" x 0.74". But they have 26 digital outputs of which 2 are used for USB leaving 24 to use without special programming. I'm going to see if I can tuck it in a build. I put 22 resistors on it, and formed a couple ground bus bars for easier LED soldering.
I needed to know if I can actually use all the outputs at the same time on the MH Tiny device so I looked up the spec sheet, and found that the device has a maximum current output of 40 milliamps per output, and 200 milliamps total for the device. Since I have 1K resistors for each LED, at 5 volts, that is 5 milliamps per output times 24 outputs, so I am only using 120 milliamps. The device does not get hot, I ran it for while and checked. So here is a video of the test for those interested:
