This shows how I painted the Tomix tram tracks to give them better look.

I decided to make a new set of vending machines for the east tram station (and other places in the city). They are build from multiple layers of styrene, transparent polyester and printed photo paper.

Time to rework and improve the look of the Shin-Yukari East tram station. I will make new station seats and ads based on photos taken in Toyama in 2017.

​Two years and five months ago, I managed to control a Tomytec bus by using an electromagnet under the road. I am now happy to report that I have finally been able to move the modules of the main street, bus interchange and Iwasehama station to the layout. All the wires for the bus control blocks, the hundreds of LED lights, the signals and the tracks are connected and everything seems to work fine. Well, not everything. There are still so many things to improve. These buses sometimes seem to have a mind of their own!
Next (major) step: finish the tram layout, and make sure that trams and buses don't collide! For that, I'll have to teach the Raspberry Pi Python application controlling the buses to talk to Rocrail! Interesting challenge.

This is the catenary system for the tunnel section east of the underground station. It is built using Evergreen styrene H columns. The bottom (top on the photo below) is covered with aluminium foil.

These bathrooms were scratch built using styrene sheets. The outside walls are printed on photo paper protected by a dull clear coat.
The prototype can be found in front of Shin-Yokohama's station. They have been recently renovated and are part of the Do Amenity network.

This is what I have done with the "smallest display in the world"
The display is a tiny 72x40 0.42" OLED display, available from AliExpress here:
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/33026
For this project, I have used a Seeeduino Xiao microcontroller.
https://www.seeedstudio.com/Seeeduino
I highly recommend it. The Seeeduino Xiao is compatible with the Arduino IDE, but it is much more powerful, using a SAMD21 chip with much more memory than an Arduino Nano (for example).
Fitting the display at the back of the truck was not easy. The display's flat cable is hardly long enough to hide the controller board under the street.

All LEDs are 0402 (0.5 x 1mm) LEDs purchased pre-wired from AliExpress (look for "wired 0402 led"). When fitting the LEDs:

• I first carve out the space for each LED using a 0.6 mm drill bit. It is important that the LEDs do not sit "outside" of the car body, but are actually embedded into the car plastic body.
• I drill two 0.3 mm diameter holes for the two wires.
• The LEDs and wires are secured using one drop of white glue inside the body of the car.

The Round Cushion Drums and Barricade Chain Stand KY Blocks have been 3D printed locally. I modelled them taking these sites as reference:

• ​www.askul.co.jp/p/H887257/
• www.signmall.jp/item/11360002456.html
  

I have designed the 3D model using Autodesk Fusion 360

The design of the main building of the tram terminal station was clearly inspired by the Iwasehama station (岩瀬浜駅​, いわせはまえき), which is a town of the Toyama Port on the Sea of Japan and last station of the Toyama Chihō Railway Toyamakō Line (also called Portram). 

​- TFT display is 320x240 (240x320 portrait) ILI9341
- I use fbtft_device to drive the display
- The video is a h.264 mp4 file played by mplayer

​Hardware components used:
* ESP32 (Lolin32) with 4BM Flash memory
* Tourist Information: 0.96" 80x160 RGB IPS display with ST7735 driver (only the top 80x80 pixels are used and visible)
  
  Connections:
  DISPLAY      ESP32
  --------------------
  GND            GND
  VCC             V3
  SCL             SCL       (SPI Clock)
  SDA            MOSI     (SPI Data (to slave))
  RES            GPIO4    (Reset)
  DC              GPIO2    (Data/Command)
  CS              SS/5      (Chip Select)
  BLK            GPIO15

Uploading files to the ESP32 flash:
Install ESP32 Filesystem Uploader in Arduino IDE
https://randomnerdtutorials.com/install-esp32-filesystem-uploader-arduino-ide/
https://github.com/me-no-dev/arduino-esp32fs-plugin/releases/

The size of the ESP32 SPIFFS partition can be set in the IDE as 1Mbyte or 3Mbytes.

Place the video/image files inside the sketch folder, in a folder called "Data".  Then upload all the files in the folder using the Arduino IDE "ESP32 Sketch Data Upload" option in the "Tools" menu.
​
The sketch loads
- an 80x80 pixel background image (back.jpeg) once at the beginning
- a sequence of up to one thousand 40x80 images (videoNNN.jpeg) stored in the built-in flash memory.
  
The videoNNN.jpeg files are built as follows:
- Scale and crop the source video to 40x80 (portrait) with Handbrake
- Extract the .jpeg files with ffmpeg:
    ./ffmpeg -i video.mp4 -s 40x80 -r 10 video%03d.jpeg

​Summary and status on June 21, 2020.

Received the new Greenmax 2594 (non working) Repeat Signals. They really look good!