Jungle Drive In Dimensions HO
Unpacking
Remove the presentation layer with the label. The following will be displayed. Pull out the U piece. Carefully remove the drive in from its package.
Then un tape the keyboard, controller and other items.
Grab both speakers and pull out the remaining packaging. Un tape the speakers from the cardboard.
The keyboard dongle is preinstalled inside your drive in. We recommend you fully charge the keyboard with its included cable before using it extensively.
Attach the speakers to the wires marked left speaker and right speaker. If you are using a separate audio system insulate these wires.
Unpack the raspberry pi power supply and plug it into the bottom of the animator as shown. If you want to hook the drive in to your audio system plug in a 3.5mm Stereo cable to the preamp output.
Power it up
Plug in the raspberry pi power supply into an outlet.
The drive-in will boot and automatically run start Jimmy Trains software that will announce “animations are active”.
Operation
The animator jungle drive in ships with a 4 button wired remote that you can mount anywhere on your layout.
To use the remote, plug its cables into the wire harnesses located under the drive-in. One is marked L/R SW and the other 3/4 SW. Make sure you match the wire colors when plugging in (i.e. black to black, red to red etc).
The first button will start the animation. The second button activates the main menu which will allow you to change settings.. The remaining two buttons are used to lower and raise the volume.
After the animation is started you can interrupt it by pressing the first button or pause/unpause it by pressing the second button.
Have fun animating!
Continuous mode
If you want animations to run continuously you can hold the first button down until you hear the announcement “Continuous mode activated…”
To deactivate press and hold the first button until you hear “Continuous mode deactivated”
Main menu
If you press the second button a message will play “main menu press left (first on the remote) button to scroll through items press right (second on the remote) button to select the item”.
Pressing the first button will scroll through the different options. When you hear the option you want press the second button.
Further instructions will play for each menu option.
If the menu has an “Exit this menu” option, use that to get back to “animations are now active”. Menus without the “Exit this menu” option will automatically go back to “animations are now active”.
Menu summary
- Choose Sounds
- Random intermission
- Random movies
- Random music videos
- Random youtube
- Random Christmas
- Random music
- Random all
- Intermission settings
- Intermission between movies off
- Intermission between movies infrequent
- Intermission between movies frequent
- Intermission between movies always
- Volume level adjustment
- Lower volume
- Raise volume
- Hold the right button to commit changes
- Webpage options
- Web page on
- Web page off
- Hear web url
- Hear instruction on how to enable web access
- Exit this menu
- Add my sound or animate them
- Hear instructions
- Time stamp mode on
- Time stamp mode off
- Exit this menu
- Exit this menu
Choose sounds menu
This option is the most commonly selected menu option.
Press the second button to get into the main menu.
Then press the first button. When you hear “Choose sounds” press the second mouse button to confirm. You will then hear another menu announcement “Sound selection menu…”
Press the first button to scroll through the various media folder that are available.
The media folders that are preinstalled on you animator are:
- Random intermission
- Random movies
- Random music videos
- Random youtube
- Random Christmas
- Random music
- Random all
Once you have found the option you want press the second button and it will confirm that it is set with “you have successfully selected your option, animations are now active”
Install the “drive-in” on your network
The “animator drive in” is a raspberry pi computer. To make the most use of this product you will want to set it up on your network. This will allow you to log onto it remotely and add your media files or control it using a web page.
Using the keyboard provided click on the internet icon as shown
You should see your network. The drive in can operate on either a 5G or 2.4G network. Choose the one that is appropriate for you.
Now that it is on your network. Restart the drive in by going to the raspberry pi menu on the left and scroll to the bottom and click on logout and then choose “reboot”.
The drive in will reboot and this time, if successful, it will announce that it is now on your network.
Change the default password on your “drive-in”
Go to the raspberry menu on the left. Choose “preferences/Raspberry Pi Configuration” and the following will display. Change your password. If you don’t want to change the password you can use the default password “jimmytrains”.
Animator web page
If you successfully connected your animator to your network you can access it by typing “animator-drive-in.local:8083” in your browser.
You can use this web page to activate animations and change settings from your phone, tablet or computer. All you need to do is be connected to your local wifi network.
Click on the tabs “Animations, Lights, Settings, Animation Tables” and the following pages will be displayed. Note: The media displayed is an example, you will load your own media.
Set up VNC
If you want more control over your drive in, you can remote into using VNC viewer. You can also use this tool to transfer media files to your “drive-in”.
You can download and install VNC viewer from this website. VNC viewer. Note: You just want the free viewer. You don’t need to pay for anything.
The install screen should like like something like this.
Once it is installed. Start it and it will look something like the following.
We need to establish a new connection to your raspberry pi. To do this we want to know the ip address of the pi on the network. So using your portable keyboard go to the VNC icon on your drive in screen. Select that and it will show the ip address as shown below. In my example it is 192.168.1.45.
Then on vnc viewer on your computer choose new connection. I choose to give it “drivein” as the name. Click ok.
Click Ok and the following screen will display.
Click the icon and enter “drivein” for the username and your password.
You are now have accessed the pi user interface on your computer. How cool is that?
Put your own media on your Drive in
Adding music
To add your own music onto the animator you can do this by first converting your music to a wav file encoded with a sample rate of 22050 Hz and a sample format of 16-bit. They must be in stereo. Also you want to normalize all songs to -10db. This prevent them from being clipped at the highest volume level on the drive-in.
You can do this with audacity a free application. https://www.audacityteam.org/
Once you have installed audacity open the music file that you want to put on the animator.
Note: Your screen might be different than the one below. See audacity documentation for details.
Choose select all under the select menu. The select area will be white like shown below.
Then under the “effect” menu select “volume and compression/normalize”. The following will be displayed. Normal to a peak amplitude to -10.0 db and press “Apply”.
Then go to the file menu and choose export/export as wav. On the export audio screen change the sample rate to 22050 as shown.
Then save the file to a folder that you will later transfer to the animator drive-in. Name the file with lower case letters and spaces like “my music file.wav”.
If you want an image displayed while your songs are playing. Create a 1280 X 720 pixel jpeg using your favorite image editing software. Save with the same name as your music file i.e. “my music file.jpeg”.
Repeat this for the rest of your songs.
Once you have all your music created transfer them to the animator using VNC. See “transfer files using vnc” for instructions.
Adding videos
You can use any video editing software to create your video. We like to use DaVinci resolve it is a free application. https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve
Your video must be mp4s and the sound should be normalized to -10db. This will prevent the sound from being clipped at the highest volume setting on the “drive – in”.
Note: Your screen might be different than the one below. See Davince resolve documentation for details.
Start DaVinci resolve and choose “Untitled Project” and press “New Project”. Enter a project name and press OK.
Your screen will look like below. Make sure the “Edit” tab is selected.
Right click in the “Timeline 1” area and select “Import Media”. Select the video file you want to edit.
Now select your file and drag it to the time line as show below.
Next we will normalize the sound to -10.0 db. Right click the audio 1 track and select “Normalize”.
Select “Sample Peak Program” and set the target level to -10.0 dB. Click “Normalize”.
All the changes to the video are now complete. Click on the “Deliver” tab. Looks like a rocket :). The following screen will be displayed.
Choose the folder that you want to save the file to. Name the file with lower case letters and spaces like “my new video.mp4”.
Make sure “MP4” is selected as the output with a resolution of “800×480 pixels”.
Press “Add to Render Queue”. Then press “Render All” to save your video file.
Repeat this process for the rest of your videos.
Once you have all your videos created transfer them to the animator using VNC. See “transfer files using vnc” for instructions.
Media folder
All the media for the drive-in is stored on the animators hard drive as shown below.
The media folders are:
- christmas
- intermission
- movies
- music
- music videos
- youtube
The folders random_config and pictures are system folders and should never be removed or deleted. They are used by the software.
You can add you own media folders too. Just create a folder in the media directory. Use lower case letters to create your folder and then put wav or mp4 files in this folder.
When you restart your Animator Drive-in it will scan for new folder names and add them to the “choose sounds” menu.
The Animator will translate the folder name into a spoken name if the internet is available. If not, it will call it song 1, song 2 etc.
Transfer files using vnc
Log into your vnc connection to your “drive-in”. The following will be displayed. Hover over the top center of the screen. The VNC menu will pop up. Select the icon with the arrows.
The following file transfer screen will display.
Press “Send files”. The following will display. Choose folder or files to transfer. They will then be copied to the “drive-in” into a folder on the desktop called “code drivein”.
Move your files to the media folder by cutting and copying. Its important that you cut these files out of the “code drivein” folder because you might run out of space during the move. The drive in hard drive capacity for media is about 15GB. Do not exceed this amount.