BasinBum

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Our club has three night flies scheduled for this year so I thought I'd finally get around to building the "Ultimate" trainer I have been dreaming of. Since I originally learned to fly on a Kadet Seniorita (three channel) and knew how strong an airframe it is I decided to start with a Sig Kadet Senior. I knew I had several two strokes laying around that would power it and I had a few other mods in mind as well.

I got lazy and just took pictures occasionally throughout the build but it's a pretty straight forward kit. The most interesting thing about it is the lighting system which after searching I discovered not much is written on RCU about.

I'll go over the other mods I did as well but this isn't a step by step build thread, which would have been pretty boring anyway.

BasinBum

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Here is the first full lighting test of the covered plane. I still have a lot of work to do, you could say it's at the ARF stage since it's covered and ready for final assembly. I'll go over the components, where I got them and how to hook them up.

BasinBum

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Another reason I chose the Senior is the open construction and windows which lends itself to interior lighting. If you are familair with the kit you can already tell that I took all the dihydral out for a more aerobatic plane. The original design doesn't have ailerons so I added some big barn door style that are hinged at the top making for a cleaner look to the wing. I moved the landing gear block forward to the leading edge of the wing so it is a taildrager and added a tailwheel. I bought a fiberglass cowl off Ebay for $12 instead of carving the balsa like on the original. I'm stuffing an OS 91 two banger on the front to overpower the crap out of it but with an 80 inch wingspan I don't think it's out of the question. I'd rather have a four stroke but since I already had the 91 laying around... Other than that, I added one inch to the rudder for knife edge flight.

I'll show pictures of what I have done in the next few days.....

tschuy

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Looks super BasinBum...

Could you share with everyone what lights you are using?

Myself I'm interested in doing something similar...


Cheers,

BasinBum

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Sure Tim, that's the whole point of this thread!

Here is a normal picture of of the plane so far for comparison.

BasinBum

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Now for some particulars....

I did some Googleing and reading about LED's since I new that was the type of system I wanted to use. I also looked at the prebuilt offering from Ram and the Cold Cathode stuff that's available. Here is what I came up with.

BasinBum

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I learned you can power LED's with batteries and just a resistor if you know a little about Ohm's Law but there are several advantages to using the MicroPuck driver. The driver sends out pulses to the LED's instead of a continuos flow like a battery would and uses less energy to maintain a constant brightness of the lights. My next test is to determine if all this is going to cause radio interferrance because I have been concerned about the pulses and all those wires. I'm going to run the antenna down inside the fuse and do some range testing today on 72mhz. I usually fly on Ham but all my Ham recievers are mounted right now but, I may pull one to check it also.

I am powering the 19 LED's with two AA Alkalines. I'd rather use Nicads but they don't have sufficient voltage to run the driver. I left the system on for three hours last night and didn't notice any change in the light output.

BasinBum

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It turns out you can buy the driver from any number of companies online by searching "led driver" on Google. Here is just one of them:

http://www.ledsupply.com/led-drivers.html

If you check the application notes it gives all the specs and how to hook it up. The main things are to use enough LED's in parrallel so you don't overpower them and never hook up power to the driver without the load of the LED's on it. To avoid that situation I am using a four pronged plug on the wing and running one of the battery wires through it with a bridge on the other side. That way it will only complete the battery circuit when the wing is plugged in. Also I figured I could run from 14 to 24 LED's and be within range and I ended up with 19.

BasinBum

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Here are some more pictures of the system. I used stranded 18 gauge wire from Radio Shack and twisted it in my drill. I soldered each LED in with heat shrink on each wire and then a larger piece on the whole thing for stress relief. It was a little tedious at first but once I got a rythem going I kind of enjoyed it.

tschuy

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Hey Basinbum...

Only thing that I can see that "may" , "possibly" cause a problem is that you have the servo lines running parrallel and too close to your servo wires. If the led driver does pulse the power to illuminate the led's this may generate some noise that could cause some feedback through the aileron servos.

It is were me I would do a pretty thorough range check with the LED's running to see if you get any kind of servo glitch.

Hate to see that pretty airplane go down.

Cheers,

BasinBum

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Tim,
I agree and the first thing I did today was put a reciever inside the plane with servos attached. I ran the antena wire around the puck and some of the leads. No glitches with the TX off or on. It's a good start but I'll do more thourough range testing as I go. I didn't run the servo extensions next to the wires yet and that may cause a problem also but since I couldn't find anyone running a similair set up I'll just have to keep building and testing.

tschuy

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My prior experience has shown me that the extended servo wire runs for ailerons are susceptible to interference. I had one servo glitch one me quite often. I put a choke on it and the problem went away...

Also be careful how you run the receiver antenna...

You probably know all this stuff any ways, but I'm stating it for the benefit of everyone else...

Cheers,

Kmot

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BB, very cool! [sm=thumbup.gif]

BasinBum

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Here is the finished product complete with bomb drop doors, camera mount and of course night lights. Some 25 flight later with no problems and many bombing runs it flies great. Tonite was my first night flying experience and it was relatively easy to see and the glow stick parachutes were all recovered safely.

js3

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BB,

Very nice! Thanks for the thread.

Kmot

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Dude! That is friggin' awesome!! [sm=thumbup.gif][sm=thumbup.gif]