The idea of a clock that runs faster than real time to compensate for the compression in our model world is nothing new.  The idea has been with us since at least the 1960s.  It provides a way to schedule our operating sessions, providing a sense of real time passage and urgency without needing literally thousands of feet of track to represent the vast distances covered by our prototype railroads.  Aside from being a display on the wall, guiding operators’ train movements, fast clocks have remained an isolated system, our model world unaffected by the passage of scale time.  Think about all the things in our daily lives that are linked to the time of day and you’ll quickly realize how odd that is given all our other technological advancements, and how much potential is in that idea.  We believe fast clock integration is one of the huge, unexplored areas left in the hobby today for added realism.

On a grand scale, imagine the potential to change the scene lighting as your operating session progresses, from the dark blue ambient light of a full moon through the oranges and yellows of daybreak into the bright white light of midday sun and finally back to the reds and oranges of sunset.   Thinking somewhat smaller, streetlights should start coming on around “dusk”, and go off around “dawn”.  Building lights should start coming on around the same time, but start turning off as businesses close and your tiny model citizens go to bed.  Possibly you’re modeling the midwestern US, where it’s common to have the local civil defense siren go off at noon.  The possibilities are nearly endless, and thanks to modern electronics, these possibilities can be realized.

In this article, we’ll show you how to build an inexpensive device that allows you to synchronize items on your layout to fast clocks by using MRBus, the networking protocol that connects the Iowa Scaled Engineering Networked Fast Clocks, in conjunction with the popular Arduino prototyping environment.

Read the complete article at iascaled.com.