LED Lighting Made Easy
A little tinkering over the weekend...
Got some LED lights and controllers from ebay-china. They're cheap and fast, certainly way less than anything for sale in LHS's in these parts. I've seen light kits for near $100 - just not in my realm.
I posted in the tech section about getting these controllers to work with an aux radio channel. They're about $4 but no documentation whatsoever, how they work, how to hook them up, nor how to operate them. With some experimenting I found the center poles are the negative side, the outers positive, so got lights to turn on. The controller has 5 modes which continuously cycle for each radio signal. So if you have an on/off setting for the auxiliary channel each time you turn the switch on and off it cycles to the next mode - all on, one or the other channel on, slow alternate flash, fast flash, all pulse, and all off. Setting a digital radio - my Spekctrum - to momentary for the aux channel means for each click it cycles to the next mode. Do-able. And cheap - me like. "thumbsup"
Next doing some browsing for light buckets and DIY, here and elsewhere there were lots of suggestions for setting up lights. One idea was to use plastic pump-spray bottle caps, cut down and drilled for LED's. This worked out rather well, and I had masked off the headlight area before painting so all I needed was some light behind them for headlights. Painting the buckets silver makes them opaque enough that there is very little bleed through on the back side, inner fenderwell area.
They're glued on with CA so rather permanent. LED's last for forever anyway so I'm good with it.
I had already installed a white and red led harness for front and rear bumper lights and plugged directly into the receiver for power. Now with my controller I was able to plug the new headlights harness AND the four bumper lights into the controller and plug that into the aux receiver channel. The light controller fit inside the Ascender receiver box. A servo extension lead comes out to plug in the headlights which are attached to the body.
Now I have lots of lighting which are controllable with the radio transmitter.
The lenses aren't super clean, but since the lights are mostly on anyway it's not a dealbreaker. I scribed horizontal and vertical lines into the back of the lens area of the body, then sanded lightly with 360 grit paper to give it a sealed-beam kind of look. Made a trim ring with a black sharpie. I wish I could figure out a cleaner way to do this, but it's do-able.
