Have a 3D model street and building. My Model Car passes by and an LED lights up in the model house.

[projectcitywalk]

Please Help,

So I have a 3D-Model house made out of cardboard and there's a street as well (See Attachment). I have (3) Cars all different sizes truck etc. When I roll the car down the street I want that car to get to a certain area to trigger off a light that I can place in the model house/building.

But here's the catch along with an example.

I have a truck
I have a regular car
and I have a Van

So I would like the truck to trigger off a light that's in the building to the far right
And the regular car to trigger off the light at the bottom storefront
and the van to trigger of the light in another area.

So basically They call need to have seperate sensors to trigger off that corresponding light in the model building.
By driving the regular car down the street it will not trigger what the truck would have triggered in this example.
But if all 3 are on the street platform, of course all of the lights will light up.

Is there a programmable sensor that I can place underneath each vehicle that when it gets to a certain area of the road it trigger the LED.

This is for my Sons school project.

I have attached the small street model but not the cars yet because I have to purchase them.

Any help along with what I'll need to purchase will be thankful.

Thank you guys for your time and effort with assisting me on this.

 

[kellys_eye]

If the vehicles are wide enough then place magnets on the left, middle and right sides of the vehicles and reed relays connected to the lights as appropriate.

If you want the lights to remain on for any length of time (after the vehicle has passed) then you will need to fit monostable (delay) circuits to each light.

 

[Harald Kapp]

Nice model street you have there.

If the vehicles are wide enough...

If they aren't, you could place NFC tags at the bottom of the cars and an NFC reader under the street. A small computer (e.g. a Raspberry Pi) could read the tags and control the lights accordingly. But this is way more sophisticated than Kelly's simple and elegant proposal.

 

[Harald Kapp]

Good Day Harald and thank you for your help with my project.

Here's you response to my inquiry regarding having model cars driving down the street (or me rolling it over the street) and having the lights turn on in the model house.


If they aren't, you could place NFC tags at the bottom of the cars and an NFC reader under the street. A small computer (e.g. a Raspberry Pi) could read the tags and control the lights accordingly. But this is way more sophisticated than Kelly's simple and elegant proposal.

My questions:
I am very interested in using the NFC tags instead of the magnet relays but could use your expertise in this area.

Here's my setup:
I have (5) model buildings that I want to put LED Lights in
I have (5) cars and a long road (see attachment for road)
The road isn't thick as I was able to put a magnet in between them to see just how effective communication would be through it.

What I need it to do:
I want each of the (5) cars to independently turn on a specific light in the model building when they are introduced to the street (manually rolled on)
So each car will have it's own identification to turn on the light with the NFC sticker on bottom of car.

I would like that car to trigger the light where ever on the road it is placed. So it must be an extended trigger.

For Cost efficient can you PLEASE send me in the right direction to what I need to purchase to make this happen so that I can purchase it? And give me some idea of what I will be connecting to accomplish this task.

If possible I don't want to use my Iphone to make signal. But to have something setup behind the building that will run itself.
I am pretty computer savvy but not so much on the linux side.

I went to Amazon.com to see if I can determine what items I would need to purchase to do this, but just got completely lost.

I am very graceful to any advise and links that will direct me to the purchase that I will need to accomplish this.

See attachment once again of the model

Regards,
Sterling
[email protected]
skype: projectcitywalk

 

[Harald Kapp]

Sterling,
thanks for your confidence, but alas I'm not the expeert in NFC as you may think. However, there's plenty of information on the net.

First you'll need NFC tags to stick under your cars. These tags are inexpensice and can be found for as little as 0.13 € (Google).
Next you'll need an NFC reader to read the tags when a car passes over the reader.
Last not least you'll need a controller to evaluate the information from the NFC reader and turn the light on and off accordingly.

For reading the tags and controlling the lights a commonly used platform is an arduino (controller) with an NFC reader shield (other platforms than arduino are also possible). This page shows how to read and write NFC tags with an arduino, incl. code examples. It simply reads the information from the tags and prints it on the serial interface (serial.print()). Instead of printing the information you'd use a set of ife-then-else or a switch-statement (some programming has to be done by you) to turn on and off the lights instead. To switch the light on and off you'll need a second shield (that's what the arduino interface cards are called), I recommend a relay shield (again: Google) which will separate the delicate electronics of the arduino from the comparatively high power requirements of the lamps. Arduino shields can be stacked above one another, you'll have to take care of the right order to avoid physical and electrical interferences.

I hope this gets you started.
By the way: as this topic now becomes heavy on the microcontroller side, I'll move the thread to the microcontroller forum to improve your chances of qualified support.