How do you get started lighting a model?

DanielB

Sr Member
So I'm wanting to light my first model, and I get the basics such as series and parallel circuits. If I want to light say 4 engines on an X-wing, I think it would be pretty straight forward and I could do it.


My hang up is when you have TONs of wires, leds, and flashing lights. A 1/350 Enterprise for example. How do you know what you can hook up to, and what you can't? How do you know how to blink the lights? How do you tell the circuit...blink these lights, but don't blink these lights. How do I know that these windows go on a parallel circuit, but this other led doesn't. Are the windows in teh saucer, secondary hull on the came parallel circuit, same series circuit? Saucer on one circuit, and secondary hull on a different one? I am at a loss to understand how so many of you can brilliantly light your models when finding a "how to" guide seems very difficult. There seems to be no clear tutorials on how to apply circuit knowledge into wiring an Enterprise.




Anyone have advise?
 
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I would lay everything out using a breadboard first.
Then see what works and what doesn't. Then draw out the wiring layout or take a photo of it.
I have a 1/350th TOS Enterprise I need to tackle myself.
You can buy flashing LED lights.
http://www.ebay.com/bhp/blinking-led
If your doing something as large as the Enterprise your going to have to go with a 12 volt system to power all the leds.
 
hi Daniel,

as Mash mentioned,especially if you are doing a complicated electrical scheme, draw it out on paper first. I like to find a blueprint type of picture of my model in the internet and then use Paint, or even MS Word to start placing LEDs. Below is an example in MS Word of how I drew up the landing bay for a Galactica that I am doing now. The bay itself and the runway decal are pictures copied into Word and the rest are just shapes. I like using Word for this because I can document the whole model plan as well as reference shots of other models or originals and write my thoughts and goals alongside... kinda like a magazine.

Capture (1).PNG

Put on your plan things like where you want which color LEDs but also what you want them to do (e.g. blinking, constant on, fade in/out, etc.). If you can use FiberOptic, you may be able to reduce the amount of LEDs you need and channel the light directly to where it needs to go. With FiberOptic, you are also more flexible as to where you can mount your LEDs, as you can put them anywhere in the model and not necessarily directly next to where the light is supposed to be seen.

Also get an idea what type of wire you will use to connect them to the power source. As I generally do not have a lot of space to spare in my models, I like using very thin lackcoated wire as opposed to insulated. Once you have the plan down, compare all that to your actual model to see if everything fits as you thought.... for tight areas you may have to downsize to using SMD (Surface Mounted Device) LEDs.

All of that is important to calculate your total power consumtion. Remember, two blinking LEDs that blink Offset from another (i.e. one is on,the other is off, then vica-versa) consume the same as 1 constant on LED, even if the blink rate is 1 millisecond. That also means if you make a chaser (Night Rider type of LED effect) with 10 LEDs, to calculate your total power consumtion you would only calculate 1 LED, because there is only one on at a time. I like to blink my LEDs a millisecond on and then a millisecond off. The human eye cannot see this and you just halved the power consumtion and doubled the lifespan of your LED. The only down side to doing this, is if you plan on filming your model, your videocam has a much higher capture rate as the human eye and could likely be seen as a slight flickering in the video.

Once you have a power plan, you can start thinking about which LEDs you want to have on the same curcuit. To calculate this there are a ton of LED calculators on the web (http://led.linear1.org/led.wiz). Most of them also explain very good the difference between parallel and a series hook-up. Otherwise you just enter which Color LED (different Color LEDs have different power needs), some calculators have "normal" power consumtion numbers for calculating, but once you buy your LEDs, check out the actual consumption on the package (or ask your dealer when you buy them) as this could be slightly different and make sure that your total power consumption plan is still in the green.

The next question is how you want to do all the magic. As Mash stated you can get a lot of lighting kits on the web or Ebay. They all have their advantages as well as their disadvantages. the pre-made kits are all made according to someone else's Fantasy (and "sale-ability" of the lighting package), so if you want to do something out of the ordinary, you will likely not find a suitable kit. On the other Hand, a kit is a great way to "get your feet wet" and understand how all this works.

In the end, if you are going for a do-it-yourselfer, you will need some sort of microcontroller to handle all the blinking, or what-have-you-not. You can do this with a 555 chip to do simple blinking patterns, but to be honest I have never used them. I personally like to use an Arduino to do this. I write a bit of Code saying blink LED-1 every 1 second, FadeOn LED-2 every 3 seconds, or turn on LED-3 and 4 when I push a button, and so on. With the arduino board alone, I can control up to 13 output circuits (meaning 13 different lighting patterns, each pattern can be connected to a resonable amount of LEDs), with added chips like the TLC5940 from Texas Instraments, you can control 16 more, but it gives you the option to connect another TLC5940, and another, and another so in the end you can control hundreds of LEDs (in theory).

Arduino can do so much more though, once you get to know how it works, you can make it play audio sequences or connect sensors to it to trigger actions (like when someone enters the room to turn on the LEDs) or connect a motor to the arduino to make things move (eg, make the voyager nacelles go up and down to warp mode) or even connect to your model over Wireless LAN or Bluetooth or even internet, the only limit is your fantasy.

the arduino itself costs about 20$ but you can use the arduino to replicate itself onto a $1 to $7 chip. ( Here with an AT-Mega chip and here is how to export it to an AT-tiny chip - the latter meaning smaller size but fewer outputs). Doing this you reduce the size by at least 10-fold and your Arduino gets to live to see the next model. :) Check out the Learning/playground at Arduino.cc for ideas and you will never be bored again.


hope that helps.
 
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Like the others have mentioned, plan it out first. Lay it out on paper and see what's what, then lay it out on a breadboard for testing and troubleshooting. This is assuming you've done your research first and have a basic idea of what you want it to do.

The rest of it is laying out what you want to do. There are specific programs for circuits, but you can use what you know if you follow some basic rules. These rules, like thickness of lands, leads and traces are all found online.

For a light setup for my Agents of SHIELD Bus build,I wanted to light it up with LED's and fiber optics, so I learned everything I could about making circuit boards. This was my first attempt at making a circuit board. I used illustrator to lay out all the traces of the circuit and then printed it out on glossy paper. You can find videos of this method on Youtube.
Here's the breadboard layout..
14172421421_9ac9492fc0_z.jpg


Here's the circuit board after being etched..
14033688090_be959b6f59_z.jpg


Here it is with all LED's on. One of the white LED's is a strobe.
14046178768_a939987b2b_z.jpg


Here's the board in the plane...
14316419884_920ff06217_z.jpg


Here's the plane with the lights on...
15095039727_728ab557b5_z.jpg


In total, 23 strands of fiber optic wire go to various points on the plane to give me the effects I wanted. Like I said before, this was my first go at it, so don't be scared of it. Just do the necessary research, get the right materials, plan and think ahead and have a go at it.
 
If all this is too complicated, they sell kits for specific models. I lit my first project by ripping out electronics from other toys. Heck, my 29" Falcon is stuffed with electronics from the big Hasbro toy. It lights up, makes sounds and only cost me $30 because the Hasbro Falcon was missing pieces.


Regarding the flashing LED's you can buy led's in all shapes and forms....Red, blue, flashing red, flashing blue. The flashing LED's have a built in thingy that makes them blink.
 
If all this is too complicated, they sell kits for specific models. I lit my first project by ripping out electronics from other toys. Heck, my 29" Falcon is stuffed with electronics from the big Hasbro toy. It lights up, makes sounds and only cost me $30 because the Hasbro Falcon was missing pieces.


Yea,.. What lear60man said,...:cool
 
If all this is too complicated...

True. Doing everything from scratch, does come at a price.... Sometimes that being your sanity. :) and yes a heck of a lot of time needs to be invested, BUT in the end the payoff is worth it.

Those blinkable LEDs certainly are an option, I have never used them though, they just aren't flexible enough to give me all the blinking patterns that I need. To code it myself takes only minutes, for the rest, there are tons of code snippets on the web, so in the end, it is only a matter of piecing everything together. In the end it isn't about the perfect model, but learning along the way. :)

Since I began I have learned so very much... Heck, I still am and I am a firm believer that the path to reaching ones objectives is the important part, not reaching it... Unless of course you do it professionally and have a customer/boss breathing down your neck. :)
 
Lighting up a model is not an easy task, even for an Engineer like me. It took me a few years to learn how to use LEDs effectively on a model, which I term as Scale Lighting.

1. Learn the Basics
Learn how to calculate the LED's current limiting resistors and know that each different LED colour has different forward voltages.
Personally, I prefer parallel connection; it does mean more wiring but minimises short outs compared to serial wiring.

2. Voltage requirements
You need to plan what type of voltage your model's lighting needs. If you want to plug it to a wall adaptor, it'll be 12 volts. Or for easy access to batteries, 9 volts, AA or even AAA batteries are a good choice. And because you could be using white LEDs which uses 3.5 volts, the smallest AA or AAA combination will have to be three; i.e. 4.5volts. However, there is also another idea which is to use USB power from a Mobile Phone charger (no, not from the PC as it has current limitations)

I prefer this voltage of 4.5v to 5v as any larger is just a waste of power to the resistors and temptation to run the LEDs in series.

3. Know your LEDs
Different LEDs have different characteristics. From the Clear LED (white spotlights) to the diffused LED (diffused lighting) to straw hats (wide angle) to SMDs (for tiny spaces. But they still use the basic current and voltage requirements.

4. Plan your lighting
Which part of the craft needs what kind of LED?
Which one blinks, at what rate and what colours? Sometimes, even the nornal blinking LEDs might not be the answer is you're looking for accurate blinking
Hint: The blink rate of the NCC-1701A is different for each movie with the JJPrise's double-flash being more 'difficult'.

5. Really, plan your lighting
Once you have determined your LEDs, you will now need to make some very critical decisions, namely the circuit. How your circuit looks like really depends on how you design your circuit. Where space inside the model is the main factor, you might want to look into microprocessors. For the same footprint, it can do much more than your usual 555/4017 combo. Using the SMD version would even save more space. However before you jump into this route, you must also take into consideration that you will need to learn programming, get a programmer and so on. Also, you will need to design your circuit slightly to include voltage regulators since they are quite sensitivity to excess power. I am not sure about Arduinos but I heard it is possible to put all the programs into one chip.

Really want to know how flexible a microprocessor is?
As each Navigation Light and Strobes of each Enterprise have different rates, I researched their timing and put them into a PIC microprocessor. One single chip has enough memory to give me the blinking patterns for four different ships:
A. NCC-1701A Motion Picture,
B. NCC-1701A Star Trek VI
C. NX-01, and
D. JJPrise's double-flashes

6. SMD
That's Surface Mount Device for short and its a real space saver where when your model is tiny. Compared to the normal electronic component, the SMD is very much smaller and uses slightly less power. Of course your circuit board design changes dramatically too since these components are to be soldered on the surface. The same goes for soldering techniques.

7. Wiring
Use those 7-core Kynex but do not be coonfused with the single core wire-wrapping wires. Since you're going to be using low voltages (4.5~5vvolts, right?) it should be OK.

8. Soldering
If you're going down the path of SMD, you will need to really practise on soldering them, especially those LEDs. Use 30 Watt irons and 0.8mm solder leads. Practice a lot on reverse and or on double-sided tapes.

9. Invest in an Engineer
I personally believe that the modeler should not be worrying so much about getting a Degree to light their models but to just worry about how to paint and assemble them. Heck, even when I do sell my lighting systems, they come as 'Plug and Play'. So, get an Engineer friend to help you out on your projects, sometimes a few meals or cans of beer might be order of the day since they would mostly see this as their challenge.

Lastly, Piscean Works
If all else fails, you can go to my Photo Album and try to pick up some notes from there. Sorry in advance as it could be a bit incoherrent since I posted it for my own reference and yeah, sorry in advance if I don't reply as my Day Job needs a lot of attention and I seldom do much lighting nowadays since I'm working far away from home.

Here you go: https://www.facebook.com/PisceanWorks/photos_stream?tab=photos_albums
 
Wow very awesome explanations of everything guys! Lots of good info, I want to try a more in depth approach the working LEDs. Whenever I need them I just chain them together off of a battery powered book light from the dollar store. I just do simple things with the lighting though nothing quite as complex, I may have to give these methods a try some day.
 
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