Someone asked in one of these threads, so here goes:
Using LEDs as a constantly glowing (as opposed to a flashing) light source is the simplest thing in the world. All you need are a LED, a power source, a switch if you want a switch, and a resistor. LEDs with the same ratings are all supposed to glow with the same intensity but that rarely happens so instead of a fixed resistance resistor, you could use a variable resistor (a pot) but I usually just go with a fixed. Depends on how much control you want over the light intensity.
Note that the LED has a long and a short leg. One is positive and one is negative. The LED will only light up if current runs one direction. What I do is I tape a wire to each end of an AA battery and briefly touch the wire tips to the LED to see what direction it lights up in (I never remember). Note which end of the LED, the long or the short, is positive and which is negative and remember that your whole circuit has to run that way (ie your power supply).
I use 330 or 500 ohm resistors. The resistor can be soldered to either side of the LED.
I use wire wrap wire in my circuits. Note, it’s very fine and if you kink it sharply, odds are that it will break. And that you need a little cheap wire wrap stripping tool to strip the insulation. But any fine soft wire will do. Soft because you want to snake it through all sorts of places in your model. Use one color wire for all the negative sizes of the LEDs another color for all the positive.
When you solder anything to your LED, make sure you don’t heat up the LED. If you have any kind of metal clip or locking tweezers, etc, that can act as a heat sink, clip it between the LED and the spot that you will be soldering. Heat can damage the LEDs so solder lightly and quickly. Heat the wire, and touch the solder to it and let the solder flow briefly.
Basically that’s all there is to it.
Because we’re modeling and the LEDs will be going to all sorts of different places, it’s easiest just to replicate the single LED, single resistor circuit 4, 6, 10 times, and connect them all to a single positive and negative wire coming out of your power source.
Your power source can be batteries but I prefer an inexpensive AC adapter and building the female plug into the model, or one in the model and another in the base. Note that there all all kinds of sizes for plugs, so if you’re mixing and matching between models, get all the same kind.
Never run your power source at above about 6 volts (3 V works fine) or you’ll blow out your LEDs. I superglue the adapter voltage switch to prevent accidents. I usually don’t use on off switches, I simply unplug. But there are all kinds of brilliant switches; on my 22" Enterprise, I attached a push type switch to the back of the deflector dish, so that pushing on the dish turns on and off the flashing nacelle lights.
If you hook up your power source backwards, it won’t harm the LEDs, they just won’t light up.
Inexpensive LEDs and adapters can be found in any professional electronics supply house. Model shops and Radio Shack type places charge 10 times what you’d pay elsewhere. Also, the bigger the store, the better a selection of LEDs. They come in different colors, of course, but also in different brightnesses and different diffusions (from almost a spotlight of a very wide beam).
If you can assemble a model and fill the seams, then lighting it will be the easiest part of making it.
You can sand or file your LEDs to any shape, down to just above the diode gap inside the plastic. Just don't expose the metal bit inside the LED. You can drill a hole in the end of the LED and superglue a fibre optic strand in there. LEDs superglue beautifully.
Tape up all exposed metal in your circuit. Superglue pretty much permanently attaches electrical tape to your model.
Don’t use an incandescent bulb anywhere in a LED circuit, tho you can connect them to the same power supply. My favorite incandescent bulbs are 683s, the size of a small LED, 5V, rated to last 100,000 hours. Great bulbs.
The only skill you have to learn here is simple soldering. And once you have that down, check out all the electronic hobby kits that are on line from electronics suppliers. You can build your own flashing LED circuits, fader circuits, or Enterprise or Jupiter 2-type light chaser circuits, from these kits very cheaply. You could do them pretty much for free when the LM 3909 chip was available, but now that it’s gone you’ll have to settle for a couple of $. And then there are simple sound circuits. I want to do the sonar ping (available with all the other sound efffects on the bonus disk in the GNP Irwin Allen soundtrack set) for my Seaview.
That’s all I can think of. No doubt I’ve forgotten something, but someone will notice and correct me.
Honest, simplest thing in the world.

Great Post Starseeker:thumbsup::thumbsup:

Very Informative, I couldn't Have said any better myself!

BP

Thanks! Holy mackerel, I think you replied to that before I finished editing it for all the speeling mustakes I made!

Starseeker,
I know it's a matter of preference, But I always run my kits at 9v or 12v.

with the proper resistors, the bulbs won't blow.

plus a lot of the prewired stuff you find at auto stores is designed to run off of car battery voltage (12v)

not a critisism, just something to add to the pot. just be sure that all off your circuits can handle tha same voltage.

Yes, I always seem to mix in my 5V bulbs somewhere in the models, so my circuits are usually 3-6 V. Or for batteries in the model or the base.
Tools: soldering iron, no more than 25 W max! Too powerful will destroy the LEDs and the fine circuits you'll be building next
Fine rosin core solder.
The aforementioned heat sink or the third hand clip stand that we all have. Makes it earsier to hold the parts while soldering, too.

Where do you get those 333 5V light bulbs ? Sounds like they'd be perfect for getting a warm white light if I'm not mistaken.

www.oznium.com

They've got very nice warm white LED's

www.oznium.com

They've got very nice warm white LED's

Hey.. do warm LED's look more (natrual) yellow in color? I was looking at warm white LED's and wasnt sure..wanted to hear from some of you guys here first before I buy a few for my current project. I also have some cell phone LEDs i plan to use that are very small squares that I may have to make a circut board to solder them too. anyone know where I can get a circut board or how I could make one? cheap!

heres a real life example.
the warm white is in the spot up front, the regular whites ae in the two side spots

heres a real life example.
the warm white is in the spot up front, the regular whites ae in the two side spots

Ok I can see the spot light does look more natural for interior lighting. Question the way you have the LED on top in the photo.. do you get enough light in the control room? and how thick is the plastic card that you are using?

thanks :thumbsup:

Sorry sorry sorry - I'm actually building some drive correctors for a telescope at present and thought of the wrong #. They're Haskell miniature lamps, 683 bulbs, and any larger electronics supply should sell them. Always best to buy in bulk. Blank circuit boards you can buy anywhere, too. If you're going to be attaching any chips to the circuit boards, get the chip sockets and solder them to the board, not the chips. If you just need something to hold the LEDs, just drill holes in styrene and use a drop of super glue on the back of the LED. You can shape any kind of mount you want. I've never tried to attach circuit board material to anything using anything but screws. I have no idea what kind of adhesives would work on that material.

Ok I can see the spot light does look more natural for interior lighting. Question the way you have the LED on top in the photo.. do you get enough light in the control room? and how thick is the plastic card that you are using?

thanks :thumbsup:

the sheet syrene is very thin (I wish I had the exact figure in my head right now) the LED's are poked thru holes.

as to the brightness..see attached

One advantage of LEDs over incandescents is their longevity. LEDs are supposed to last much longer than most bulbs. But they are not infallible. I have had 2 LEDs burn out. One was in the engine of my Klingon Bird of Prey, the other a flashing navigational light in an Enterprise. Both failures were the LEDs, not the circuits. Both cases required appalling corrective surgery. That's 2 out of maybe 200 LEDs that I've used. Oddly, I haven't haven't had any 683s burn out yet, tho after a while, once the thrill is gone, I don't light up my models much. I've shorted out plenty of both in the construction phase, tho.
The big advantage bulbs have over LEDs is that LEDs light, even the most diffuse LEDs, are pretty focused, from a very narrow spotlight that you have to be looking directly down at to see, to a wider spotlight like a flashlight. If you want a wide glow, if you want to light up a large area pretty evenly, a bulb is better suited, or aiming a LED at a convex reflective surface.
One HUGE advantage of wiring your own circuits is that sooner or later, everything fails. The more complex the lighting system, the higher the odds are that some part of it will croak, possibly snuffing the whole thing. If you put your lighting system together yourself, you know how it works. You know how to fix it. You can break it down into separate simple units (steady running lights, flashing navigational lights, warm cabin lights, pulsing weapons systems).
You also get to choose the color and intensity of the lights you want. Beatlepaul on another thread mentioned "scale lighting" and that's so important. All modelers know that color changes with scale. The intensity of light decreases with distance, and also with scale. So many models are lit so brightly inside that they could cast shadows. If there was a 1/128 person in there, the light would be more intense than an x-ray. Do it yourself and you can choose the scale effect that seems perfect to you.

So a question.. how come christmas led strings don't have resistors, or transformers?

My plan was to use a led christmas string, eliminate (or shield off with aluminum foil) lights I didn't need, and then add two smaller Led lights for the tail fins, or run fiber optics from two in the back.

Since I've got every little led electrical experience, does this sound like a worthwhile plan, or will I run into issues with smaller led lights added to the string?

I'd already cut all the "snowflake" plastic bits off the light string, and was considering maybe using a few in a custom base as outer "spotlights" on the outside of the ship.

Someone else provided em with what he used as well in case this plan has "fail" written all over it.

Gareee,
I'm no expert on the christmas lights, but I think it has something to do with the juice being spread out over the entire line of lights. if you cut the line in half and plug it in, you'll probably blow the remaining lights. and there might be tiny resistors "inline" if you will, that you just don't see.

I've seen 20 light strings that run on a battery pack which are a great time saver, but I'd be sure to not alter the string and just use all of the lights

I just used a string of battery-operated Christmas LEDs on a Tachikoma diorama and they work like a charm. They run off of 4.5 volts (3-AA). The string had 20 LEDs and I used 19 of them. I just painted the last one black. Your best bet on the tail lights is probably fiber optics. The bulbs are 5mm and the wiring may be a bit too thick for the tailfin channel. A couple of fiber strands and some heat shrink should do the trick.

Sounds like I can just drill some holes in the ends of the leds, and superglue fiber in there.. I know I have some fiber optics around here somewhere in the craft room.

Since the entire light strand was only $3, and leds don't generate heat, I'll just mask some off with black acrylic paint if they aren't needed.

what also works is to use heat shrink tubing.

bundle up a few strands of FO, stick them in one end of the heat shrink and shove the LED in the other end til they touch, then shrink the the tubing over the connection.

Like I could find something like that here in the boondocks?

There is a TINY hobby store I noticed the other day... ya never know.. maybe they have something worth picking up.

you can get heatshrink at most home improvement type stores

Cool.. odds are the Lowe's near me has it then.

Garee,
did you see Randy's announcement about his lighting kit?

http://www.hobbytalk.com/bbs1/showthread.php?t=219950

It the same setup as I used and it has all the parts you need in one place (including the heatshrink)

Yeah, but it's $60, as opposed to the $3 I spent for the Christmas tree light string...since there are what? $5 in materials at best, if it was more reasonably priced say $15 or $20, I might have just sprung for it, but times are tight everywhere, and I'll stick with my Christmas string, and use the $60 to buy both the lis pod and chariot instead.

I'll buy aftermarket stuff if it's priced properly for the work involved.

Thanks for the head's up though!

[QUOTE=gareee;2397042]Yeah, but it's $60, as opposed to the $3 I spent for the Christmas tree light string...since there are what? $5 in materials at best, if it was more reasonably priced say $15 or $20, I might have just sprung for it, but times are tight everywhere, and I'll stick with my Christmas string, and use the $60 to buy both the lis pod and chariot instead.

If the parts weren't bought in bulk, they'd be at least $9. But at $60 (or $140!), you know the thing has to be completely pre-wired, tested, ready to drop in, and guaranteed. Right?

Thing is, a dozen strung led lights aren't worth $60 to me. I'm not saying that others will not value it more then I do. I've got only so much money I will allow myself to spend on my modeling hobby, and at that price, they are not worth it to me personally.

Sorry, I guess the deep irony in the voice is my head as I wrote that doesn't come across when the words are just written down. I think $3 is a True Modelers outlay of cash and a Brilliant solution. To pay more than the model for aftermarket accessories that could be made for zip, that ain't modeling. That's... boy, I wish I had that kind of money. I don't agree with David Merriman on much, and I suspect he'd be really proud of that too if he knew me (Canadian-commie-hippie), but in another thread I just said that his Cultman article on building the Seaview is the single best overall how-to modeling article I've ever read in 30 years of modeling. I really like his comments on the nature of what he considers "real" modeling vs "assembling". But different strokes for different folks.
Mulling over how to make the radar antenna rotate. Lights and animation so would bring that thing to life.
I'm going to light the Chariot, too.

I was considering lighting the chariot as well, but yet again, Moebius didn't cast the console lightable parts clear. Same with the pod. In these days of $100 styrene kits, and $160 aftermarket kits, led lighting, and fiber optics, something really simple like that escapes developers.

I've got a 1/32 inch drill bit I use for driling out small windows on starships, and odds are I'll be able to drill out some instrument lights for the chariot, but it woulda been SO much easier to just cast them in clear, and let painters (who will be painting them anyway) paint the clear parts as they choose to.

i think we need a thread for cheaper lighting alternatives for the seaview.

or is there one already?

What? Cheaper then a $3 set of Christmas LED lights? :)

You could raid Granny's Christmas box while her back is turned.
But I have to admit, right now would be a good time to send the extra $57, or $137, to the Red Cross (see commie-hippie, above).

The red cross build models now?

My only caution on using cheap $3.00 Christmas lights is ...will you be able to change the bulbs when they burn out as opposed to using LED's which have a longer shelf life...so to speak. Lets face it...how many times have you had a strand of Christmas lights have a bulb go out? I've had many of them do that...some right out of the box.
Agreed, there might be cheaper solutions but I think some caution should be used as to what products you decide to use.

MMM

[QUOTE=starseeker;2397500]
Mulling over how to make the radar antenna rotate. Lights and animation so would bring that thing to life.
[QUOTE]

Have you seen those small, green, electric motors Target sells at Xmas for rotating Xmas tree ornaments ? I'll bet that thing spins slowly enough for a radar antenna. Unfortunatley, I've only seen these in Target during the holidays.

Hmmm... I have a few of those as well... ;)

Did the radar antenna even rotate on the ship in the series?

And Monster model man: these are $3 cheap LED white christmas lights! They supposedly have a life of over 60,000 hours, so in theory, they can last 6.84 years on all the time.. If I only run them for 4 or 5 hours a night, in thory, they should last about 20 years or so.. and I'll be dust long before then

these are $3 cheap LED white christmas lights!

Oh...I was thinking Christmas bulbs...not LED's...my bad! I'd love to see how they turn out when your done with your kit!

MMM

This looks like a good online source for mini led light sets, and it looks like they have lots of different types...

http://www.save-on-crafts.com/chrisligandl.html

I was considering lighting the chariot as well, but yet again, Moebius didn't cast the console lightable parts clear. Same with the pod. In these days of $100 styrene kits, and $160 aftermarket kits, led lighting, and fiber optics, something really simple like that escapes developers.

I've got a 1/32 inch drill bit I use for driling out small windows on starships, and odds are I'll be able to drill out some instrument lights for the chariot, but it woulda been SO much easier to just cast them in clear, and let painters (who will be painting them anyway) paint the clear parts as they choose to.

I agree with the above It would make a lot of sence to cast parts in clear. I saw some where someone cast some parts in clear and painted the cockpit of a viper and when lit it looked 100 times better and they just used one led to light the whole area (several clear color paints used). I hope in the future some manufactures will follow being we are lighting kits a lot more.:thumbsup:.

There was a reply by "Mr. Moebius" in one of my comment threads.. hopefully they'll consider it more, or for additional kit runs.

There's no actual cost involved, so the only real thing that's an issue is having to paint clear parts, if you don't want to light something, but I suspect that with people buying $100 kits, 90% or more of them will having lighting of some kind.

In the case of the seaview, it looks like without lighting, that you can't even see the interior at all without lighting, unless you keep the nose cap removable, which kinda ruins the smooth nose look.

In the case of the seaview, it looks like without lighting, that you can't even see the interior at all without lighting, unless you keep the nose cap removable, which kinda ruins the smooth nose look.


good point how many of you plan to seal off the contorl room for good and get the contour putty out to finish the nose area?:confused:

Me, for one.

good point how many of you plan to seal off the contorl room for good and get the contour putty out to finish the nose area?:confused:

I am.

Forget the putty.

JB WELD. OR the Gap filling super glue/Baking Soda method. For my Sub anyway.


BP

what grit sandpaper did you use on the superglue/baking soda method? I think the highest I have here is 400 grit.

what grit sandpaper did you use on the superglue/baking soda method? I think the highest I have here is 400 grit.


Started with 60 Grit, then 150...220..

Works great:thumbsup: