I am working to convert my ACE Mini-Titan e325 to a night-flying setup. Since winter is on the way, the only time I’ll be able to fly is later on in the day when the sun is low, or gone so this is a perfect excuse to play with lighting.

I purchased 2 feet of green and blue LED strip lighting from a vendor at the 2010 NEAT Fair while purchasing a Blade mSR and some extra batteries for it.  The LED strips can be cut down to sections consisting of 3 LEDs and require a 12 volt power supply. These strips can also be found that require a 5 volt supply.  The 12 volt powered strips work great on radio controlled models which use 3S Lithium Polymer battery packs. Because LEDs are low power draw, even a lot of LEDs won’t make for a huge impact in your flight times if you run them off of your main flight pack.  In my setup I use a male JST style connector on the canopy which makes connecting and disconnecting the LEDs for the canopy a simple and quick matter.  The female JST connector’s wires run to and tie in with the power lines which run the helicopter tail boom lighting.  These are connected to the power connector for the brushless motor speed controller.

The LED strips come with an adhesive 3M tape backing which will pretty much stick to anything. To prep the Mini-Titan canopy I scrubbed it down with 90 percent rubbing alcohol, then i scrubbed it down again and wiped it down, then one more time for good measure.  I spent a little bit of time placing strips on different locations of the canopy and finally decided on a layout for the LED strip lights.  Once set I cut the strips down to length for each location, removed the paper tape from the adhesive backing and then pressed the strips onto the helicopter canopy.

Once all the strips were down I soldered on all the wiring to connect the LED strips to each other. Soldering LED strips isn’t that hard to do with the right equipment and experience but if you haven’t soldered before I’d recommend practicing your soldering skills a lot before attempting this. There are exposed solder pads at each end of every set of 3 LEDs on the strip which allows you to solder the strips in parallel to each other.  I was a bit concerned that soldering the tape while it was stuck to the canopy would melt the canopy at points, but it is a thermoplastic and did not have any problems with the short soldering times required. I used a 45 watt soldering iron to first prime the pads with a blob of solder, and tin the ends of the bridging leads, I then placed the tinned wire atop the hemisphere shaped blob on the soldering pad, heating both till they fused then let the joint cool normally.  The last step of the soldering process takes about 2 seconds. You can see the pads in detail in the pictures below, and also how I routed the wires around and took advantage of solder pads being everywhere on the LED strip lighting.  Just mind your polarity and you will be good!

That’s all there was too it.  It took me about 3 hours last night to do all the work, but that was while watching TV and occasionally plugging the strips in after each addition to make sure everything was still working good and that I had not created any solder shorts which would cause unfortunate problems on the electrical system and batteries for the helicopter.

The results of this work are pretty good and can be seen in the photos below.  You’ll also see I have some red and white LED’s in the back. I am planning to replace these with longer strips of alternating colors (red/white or purple/white) perhaps helical wound around the tail boom so I did not detail the installation of these, though it’s pretty much the same; Clean, place and solder. I also have a 1 Watt green Luxeon Star in the front mounted inside of the canopy.  The Mini-Titan’s battery tray almost perfectly fits an old square style Luxeon Star board and with the LED right in front of a canopy vent it gets plenty of fresh moving air which means I didn’t have to add any additional heatsinking for the LED.

The setup is very bright, we took some video of it tonight and it over drove the video camera. I didn’t mess around with the video recorders settings too much but I’m sure it could have been adjusted to better tone down the lights.  While the lights are extremely bright in person as well, they are also well defined and don’t turn into a ‘glowing glob’. Here’s the short video I made of this setup.

Please let me know what you think of the canopy setup for this helicopter, or share some info on your own setup by commenting below or using the contact form to send me a personal message.

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We’ve gotten some of the Christmas lights up around here, I was a bit slow in initiating it and the holidays are sneaking up on us quickly.  These are the lights we’ve put up this year so far, all of the Christmas Lights installed this year were LED, they have a nice cold glow that goes well with the ice and snow.

It’s kind of weird around here, few of the immediate neighbors have put up lights. I’ve always been a big Christmas light fan.  They’re fairly easy to put up and take down and add a festive look to things.  Still to go are the 600 or so blue/white light string, plus the big RGB LED bulbs which color shift and do different things.  Those will go on a tree  in the left side yard this year.

LEDs are of course a wonderful option if you wish to be environmentally conscious with your holiday and Christmas lighting.  LEDs are much more energy efficient than a normal lamp light bulb.  Incandescent lamps provide a warmer glow, one of the reasons for this is that they use a small piece of tungsten wire for a filament.  As electricity runs through the filament it heats up to the point that it glows and puts off light, but in order to create that light they also create a lot of heat.  As much as 80% of their power consumption can be waste heat.  It doesn’t take a scientist to figure out that we don’t need to be heating the great outdoors in the middle of the Winter.

It used to be that LED Christmas Lights were much more expensive than the standard glass bulb type, but over the last few years the prices have rapidly decreased and become much more competitive. While you may still pay a bit more for LED lights, you also get the benefits of long life, high brightness and reliability.  Most LEDs manufactured have a lifespan of 11 years, if they’re run at full brightness non-stop.  Assuming they do not get damaged in storage or while being put up, they should last a long.  Occasionally an LED lamp does fail before the 11 years, but replacements are usually included with the strings when you buy them. Just make sure to put them in a safe location should you need them later.

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I came across this really cool link of a video on Gizmodo which you can find here under ‘Light as Performance Art’ .  I’m not sure if I like the music or the art better (sorry, weird musical tastes, I like space-out stuff)      Anyways I decided to try some extended exposures with my Sony DSC-H10, though I wish I had a better camera, can always hope

Hey if you have a good camera, try this out, upload your pics to a web server and link your site or source for images and I’ll link with credit!  Looking for amateur ‘just tried it’ type pics.  Use the ‘comment’ link on the right to send me a message, or post a comment with the info and I’ll authorize it through.

I cropped some of these photo’s and cut the resolution back.   I used a laser pointer, iPod Touch with the free ‘flashlight’ app, a color changing LED pen I got from the guys at YesCo at the sign show down in Florida and a blowtorch.    Since the sort of thing YesCo deals with is the kind of thing I work with at my day job, I have a lot of LED lighting resources at hand, so I think this is something I’ll continue to experiment with.   Stay tuned!

If interested, check out my other Light Art Posts

3/31/2011 – I haven’t done any light art stuff lately, but I do try to follow up on it now and again, I really wish I had a nice SLR to do nice open shutter long exposures.  This is kind of a cool story by Dennis Smith, it’s a 15 minute movie about how long exposures used to make spheres changed his life. I don’t think it was the art itself that did, I think it was doing something he loved.  Anyways, why not pop over to Dennis Smith’s Ball of Light (new window/tab) movie and then come back and look around some more?

And in reference to my animal books lower down in the blog this is great

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