The
golf dome we fly R/C in is very large, but not lit very well. The lights are all bright enough right at the line where the golfers stand, but as planes get further away to the back of the dome, they can get hard to see. I couldn’t help but notice some of the other flyers using strip led lights that they got from
HobbyKing as they were very bright. I found what appear to be the exact same lights at my local hobby shop,
Greenfield News and Hobby, marketed by
BP Hobbies. The install is fairly simple, just use small gauge servowire with the unneeded 3rd wire peeled offand solder to each strip after cutting them to the length you need. They are self adhesive and can be cut into strips as short as3 lights.
I’m using 18 leds total, two yellow6 light strips for each wing, wrapping them around the wing tips with 3 lights on top and 3 on the bottom, and for the tail 12 violet leds stuck on the trailing edge of the rudder.
Powering them was a bit more complicated. They are rated to run off 6 to 12v, an in fact an attempt to run off 5v resulted in them not lighting up at all, killing my first idea to just power them directly from the reciever. The other plane I saw at the domefly solved this by usinga seperate bec to run his lights, but I wanted to do it more simply, and since I was running two cells lipo, there was a easy way.
I ran a connector right to my lipos balance tap. I used a connector from a servo extension,the one thatgoes to the servo itself, and pulled off the plastic ” female ” housing.This leaves the innner plastic housting which looks just likethe other end of the servo extension exceptthat it has the 3metal pins sticking out. Theseplug directly into the balance connector, and I used the two outermostpins. This gave the full 8.4 volts from my two cell batteries.
The full 60 led strip is rated at400 mah at 12v, so using 18 at 12v would be 119mah. However, since I’m running at only 8.4v, this drops current even more to 2/3rds or about 80mah. In the normal 6 minute flight, this means that the lights are consuming about 1/10th of this or 8mah from the 450 batteries. Not enough to make any difference in flight time.
I belive this very low draw should make it possible to use this same connector idea on 3s batteries even though its pin spacing won’t allow usingall three cells. While this would seem to be creating a problemwith cell balance, I think that the very low draw won’t have much chance to get the battery very far out of balance, and then the balance charger will make them exactly even again after every flight. Caveat: I have not tried this myself yetso proceeed with caution.
These lights, while runningdimmer than if I was at 12v, are bright enough to allow true night flying, ( next summer),and will make the domeflying more fun as well.
Dean