Adding LEDs to a flying wing

25 Aug 2019

Enter Your Electronics & Design Project for a chance to win a Grand Prize of a SNES Classic and $200 Shopping Cart of Product!

Back to The Project14 homepage

Project14 Home

Monthly Themes

Monthly Theme Poll

So, my friend who you see in the video below loves flying his quadcopter in the night, motivated me to get into night flying, which meant I had to remove the FPV system which stands for first person view, which includes a camera and video transmitter, and put lights on my wing. So this meant I had to check my parts bin to see what LED strip I had available to hook to an Arduino Nano. I had two led strips available a Neopixel strip and apa102 strip. I went with the apa102 just because it weighed less because it dint have a plastic waterproof wrap around it, and it had a 3M sticky back.

Here is the picture of the LED strip hooked up with the Arduino Nano

- apa102 led strip Data connected to Arduino pin# 11
- apa102 clk connected to Arduino pin# 12

- battery JST connected to Vin , the battery is a Turnigy 2S lipo - 8.4v max (2 cell lipo)

And here is a very simple Arduino sketch that I used for the setup-

//Simple sketch for LED flying wing
#include <APA102.h>

// Define which pins to use.
const uint8_t dataPin = 11;
const uint8_t clockPin = 12;

// Create an object for writing to the LED strip.
APA102<dataPin, clockPin> ledStrip;

// Set the number of LEDs to control.
const uint16_t ledCount = 10;
// Create a buffer for holding the colors (3 bytes per color).
rgb_color colors[ledCount];
// Set the brightness to use (the maximum is 31).
const uint8_t brightness = 20;

void setup()
{
}

void loop()
{

colors[0] = rgb_color(255, 0, 0);//red
colors[1] = rgb_color(255, 0, 0);
colors[2] = rgb_color(255, 255, 255);//white
colors[3] = rgb_color(255, 255, 255);
colors[4] = rgb_color(0, 255, 0);//blue
colors[5] = rgb_color(0, 255, 0);
colors[6] = rgb_color(0, 255, 0);
colors[7] = rgb_color(0, 0, 255);//green
colors[8] = rgb_color(0, 0, 255);
colors[9] = rgb_color(0, 0, 255);

ledStrip.write(colors, ledCount, brightness);

delay(500);
colors[0] = rgb_color(0, 0, 0);//red led off
colors[1] = rgb_color(0, 0, 0);
//colors[6] = rgb_color(0, 0, 0);
//colors[9] = rgb_color(0, 0, 0);
ledStrip.write(colors, ledCount, brightness);
  delay(500);
}

Now for the most important part is to stick the LEDs on the flying wing without impacting the center of gravity of the wing (CG), I used some hot glue and tape.

And here are a some lesson learnt on adding LEDS to things that fly at night, and most of these suggestion are from my friend, who has been night flying for more than 5 years..

- Check the weight of LEDs - lighter the better- Positioning the LEDs equally on both side of the wing, so that the center of gravity. but for quadcopter this really does not make a big difference with modern flight controller(FCs) and electronic speed controllers (ESCs).
- To many blinking LEDs do not help, I found this out the hard way, after a couple of crashes. So, if you see my wing I now have only one blinking red light at the back, when initially as you see in the video above I had LEDS blinking on both the wing side
- If you are using foam board, use a couple of LEDs on the reverse, so that they diffuse in the foam, this gives a larger surface area for light diffusion, and the craft is more visible when it gets dark.
- Using an Arduino helps, as you can change the LED colors easily, or if you want to control LEDs using your phone in the field you can us an ESP32/ESP8266 based board.

If you any suggestion for night flying, leave them in the comment below..