RC aircraft LED landing light

Shniggysaurus

Newly Enlightened
Joined
Jan 4, 2013
Messages
10
Hi all.

I'm new to LEDs and electronics in general. I fly RC airplanes and I'd like to put a bright landing light on the nose of my plane. I found this LED and I thought with a little work I could make it fly. I was hoping you guys could direct me to some great tutorial threads on making this work. This youtube video seems like exactly what I need but if you guys have any threads here or other advice I would love it.

Thanks so much for the help!
 

RoGuE_StreaK

Enlightened
Joined
Apr 15, 2010
Messages
615
Location
Brisbane, Australia
So you don't have any other lighting on the plane yet? If not, then forget about the landing light until you have a good orientation setup, typically utilising cheap 12V LED strips. Make it so you can tell left from right and top from bottom, otherwise it will be a short flight and you won't get to the landing bit anyway.
Are you using 3S, 2S, 4S? If 4S you'll need something inline to reduce voltage/current, otherwise for 12V strips they actually tend to run pretty nicely on a 2S setup.
If a foamy, with the right LED orientation you can use the foam as a diffuser and light up entire surfaces, fuselages etc.

Don't get trapped into thinking brighter is better, you don't want to blind yourself whilst landing or dull what little night-sight (or dusk-sight) you may have to make out your surrounds. I think you'll find a white strip underneath will generally cast more than enough light on your landing surface.

12V strips can be run directly from a 2S or 3S lipo without any other components. Simple. Here's an example of some I recently purchased for just that role, they're on a very thin/light copper strip and don't heat up at all (ie. imperceptible). Ran one set all night on a damaged 3S in a vain attempt to bleed some voltage from it, barely made a dent in the voltage.
 

Shniggysaurus

Newly Enlightened
Joined
Jan 4, 2013
Messages
10
Thanks for the reply rogue. those strip lights are awesome and I will have some on the wing and tail and then I'm probably going to run those 3 led boards in red and green on the wing tips for orientation. I have used those on other aircraft and run them on the 3 s flight pack. My plan at this point for the landing light is to have a switch on my receiver to turn on and off one of those 10 W COB LEDs and use this regulator and then just solder a connector to plug it directly into an on board lipo. I believe that should be able to handle 3s or 4s from the lipo. Then I will glue the LED to a 1 cm heat sink and attach that to the nose or under a wing.
 
Top