LED setup for night flying?

[ThBrtmn]

Alright MR. Rob(hit my kid in the head) Jones... :mrgreen: ....Lets see some info on how to rig up an Led system to get some of these things flying at night...
Anybody Else that knows how to rig up a night led system...PLEASE contribute.
Thanks

[WillJames]

Yea Rob. Lets hear how to light up a foamy. :D

[Sar]

I don't know about Rob's methods, however I think the easiest way to light a small plane would be to tap the power from your li-poly pack to power the LEDs. You will need to use the proper size resistor to limit current to the LEDs or they may overheat and die, or explode.

There are suitable resitor calculators out there for LED's. This one linked below is for series. The first four values need to be filled out by you. The first number is the quantity of LED's, say 3. The second and third values are available from the package your LEDs came in (if you bought them from radio shack, otherwise you have to find the data sheet). The fourth value is the voltage of you power supply. Hit the "Find Resistor" button and it will tell you what kind of resistor to use and it's power rating.

http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/Bill_Bowden/led.htm

Use as many LEDs in series as your power supply voltage will allow, resistors waste a lot of power in non-visiable infrared radiation(heat)

The other, more efficient option is to use a microcontroller to control the current to the LEDs using a pulse width modulated (PWM) signal. I use this method more often for my LED projects as it provides much more efficiency and features.

Color Changing Rotor Blade Lights:
http://www.thaltech.com/color-rotor.wmv
Color-Changing Light Skids:
http://www.thaltech.com/lightskids.jpg

[ThBrtmn]

Thanks Sar...
So where can you get a microcontroler? How much...and is it really hard to put somthing like this together...
Also...in the above pick...is that an LED and a glass rod... That would be cool to do something like that.

[Sar]

I use an Atmel microcontroller which needs to be programmed(I use assembly language for the basic stuff like blinking, etc and a C interperter for more advanced stuff), it's not really a plug and play situation unless you know of someone who would program them for you, attach leads and send them to you ready to solder onto LEDs. They can be programmed for realistic scale lighting too, but that always puts me to sleep :D

In the picture above, they acrylic rods with LEDs mounted to the end of them. Acrylic makes a great 'light pipe'. Unfortunately it doesn't react well to alcohol/methonal and becomes brittle. I have some ideas for fixing that though.

[Curtis Burns]

~Bart~:

The easiest, maybe not the cheapest route, is to go to Radio Shack and go through their LED bin, pick out the color(s) you want and buy some small wire, the kind used in making antennas. Radio Shack sells the wire in three roll packs (green, red and copper color). You want the red because it's the smallest. This is the same wire used in making the winding in your electric motors. It has a coating instead of a plastic cover.

Keep in mind while looking for your LED's the I and the E. (I is current or amps and E is voltage) Different colors have different specs and the specs of your LED's need to be close in order to use them in the series / parallel circuit I'm about to explain.

You can get LED's that require 1.5 VDC with a certain I. If you're running a three cell Li-Po then you could run eight 1.5 VDC LED's in series with no resistors (as long as the I is very close to the same for all of them) because three cell Li-Po are about 11.1 volts and 8 X 1.5 volts = 12 volts. You would probably want to run about five LED's in series with two-celled Li-Po packs. This is considering you're going to "tap in" at the battery side of the speed control. On the other hand, you can "tap in" on the RX side where the E or voltage is regulated at about 5 VDC, then you can use four LED's in series. I always put two green LED's in the corners of the right wing and two red ones in the corner of the left wing wired in series. Then I would buy a blinking LED which always had a different I / E and buy one or two LED's with close to the same specs as the blinking LED and wire them in series to get close to the 6 VDC drop I needed. Just wire the wings and tail in parallel. If you want more lights just wire four more in a series then in parallel with the rest of the strings of LED's.

If memory serves me correctly, the long lead of LED should go to the positive (+) or red wire on a Futaba servo wire. Now, just poke the leads of the LED's through your foam so that the LED shines outward and you can solder the end of the leads on the LED to your wire you just took your hobby knife and scraped the coating off of. Be careful not to burn your foam. I have a plug plugged into a Y or a unused port on my RX for power to my lights. I solder my fine antenna wire to the positive or red wire of a Futaba plug then run the wire out the fuse or wing to the first LED's long lead and solder it. Next I solder the short lead of the same LED to a wire and run the wire to the next LED and solder to the long lead and so on until I'm back to my negative (-) or black wire on a Futaba set up. Just like wiring batteries together. You can use "magic" tape to fasten the wires and leads to your model.

As Sar said...Atmels are very cool. You can make your LED's blink in just about any pattern you can think of. However Atmels are above the scope of most pilots. I know there's several web sites dedicated to them, but that's a whole other hobby and you will need specialized equipment to program them. You may want to go to Google and search for "blinking LED". I know there are several companies that sell circuit boards with pre-programmed Atmels to blink in different ways. Also, remember to always solder because lights out at night sucks!

I've been night flying for years using this setup and it'll work on your gassers also.

Curt

PS Radio Shack sells LED's in variety packs. You may have to buy several of them to get the LED's you want but it's still cheaper than buying the LED's individually. Most of these LED's in the variety packs are in the 1.5 VDC range.

Dang, I didn't mean to type that much!

[ThBrtmn]

You guys Rock...
Thanks For making this thread rock...Keep em coming....I would like to hear everybodys experience in making these. This awesome info...

[WillJames]

SWEEEEETTT!!

Thanks for the GREAT IDEAS John and Curtis!!

[ThBrtmn]

I recently saw someone with a circuit board that all the LEDs plugged into like receiver connections...What is that?

[MadMan]

Check out my response in the previous post about my night foamy. I detail setup of my Edge as flown at blacksheep. SYstem is Curtek and draws almost no power. Get it from Dan Hice at www.scalerchelis.com