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1. 07:56 PM - RV8 LED Panel Flood Lighting diversions (Vince-Himsl)
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| Subject: | RV8 LED Panel Flood Lighting diversions |
Hello,
While you are in the dark, literally and figuratively, playing with panel
flood lighting ideas for your RV8 try this:
Place a piece of aluminum (or steel) tape on the underside of the glare
screen, both sides, near the roll bar.
Now bounce the light from an LED flashlight off these pieces of tape instead
of trying to illuminate the panel directly. You will find that this bounce
effect creates a more even and broader coverage. But see for yourself.
I am assuming you are using LED lights.
The best (price, ease of installation, effectiveness) flood lighting
available for the RV8 (IMHO) however, is the $13.00 Energizer LED forehead
light that has the two white lights with one red in the center. The whites
are too bright for flying but the center red LED and lens distributes the
red in an almost perfect pattern across the panel illuminating not only the
panel but the side areas (throttle/mixture and fuel tank handle) as well.
A very fun trick is to take one of these forehead lights and remove the two
white LED lights and put one green and one red in their place. Take one of
the removed white ones and put it in the center (removing the center red).
Now use it to look at your airspeed indicator. Instead of washing out the
color bands, this combination makes them almost fluoresce. Red responds to
red, green to green, and yellow to green plus red. Switch to the lone center
white light and observe how it provides a broad and clear blue/white glow to
your panel identical to the red one.
For those of you trying to sync the brightness of your LEDs so that one area
or instrument doesn't blind you while everything else is very dim you will
need to create a custom resistor divider network for each overly bright LED.
The trick is that most of us know to put resistors in series with an LED
(usually multiples of 300 ohms) but we are less aware of fact that placing
an additional resistor in parallel with the LED dramatically affects its
behavior. For the LED lights I am using, I placed two 300 ohum resistors in
series and one in parallel with an amber LED to get it to mimic the response
and brightness of the incandescent type lights found in my (used) versions
of the King radios and transponders.
I will forego telling you about how I modified USB laptop keyboard lights
from the Dollar Store (yep, the Dollar Store) for use as my flood lights.
Now to figure out how to tone down the Ray Allen LED trim indicators
(they're different). Half bright is too bright.
Regards
Vince H.
Idaho
RV8 VSB (Very Slow Built)
Finish
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