Post your Night Rig Pics and Videos

[maarset]

Originally Posted by hareedy

a couple of my flight of my logo 600 night rig

Wow great night flying vids!

Gutsy autos at night too. Impressed!

[cwestman]

New LED install.

[YOUTUBE][ame]http://youtu.be/LOSoBEhII5w?hd=1[/ame]

[cwestman]

[YOUTUBE][ame]http://youtu.be/LOSoBEhII5w?hd=1[/ame]

[phobius]

My 600 with radix and torison blades, turnigy LED stripes.

[Geegar]

Hi Guys,

I've just flown a display in the UK at a local school firework do.

I managed to get some video shot of it and thought I'd share it with you all.

Hope you enjoy it

Remote Controlled Helicopter with Night Magic Blades (3 min 50 sec)

[taoY]

This is my Trex 600 Pro in night flight setup.

[rkopka]

Originally Posted by taoY

This is my Trex 600 Pro in night flight setup.

These are the first pictures I see where somebody has used different colours left and right. As I come from planes I'm used to that and so I have at least different colours at the boom of my 600 (blue left, green right, white down).


How are your experiences with orientation ? How useful are different colours in your opinion ?

RK

[Clips]

A video of a friends TRex 600 with led-lights and Align night blades. It worked and looked cool but unfortunately there is not enough light on the blades. Looks good from beneath but needs more light on top. Still a good idea and something to work on.

Enjoy: [ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIUEnnCNUGM[/ame]

Clips

[taoY]

Originally Posted by rkopka

How are your experiences with orientation ? How useful are different colours in your opinion ?
RK

Nice work on your canopy, it is not a small effort to get that many lines of led strips on there.

As of different colors on different sides, it helps the orientation to a certain degree. I have terrible eye sight and it is worse in the dark. Different colors helps me personally. Here's video my buddy shot last weekend. You can take a look to see whether it helps or not. The added benefit is it gives you more effect.

First Night Flight at FOS 2012 (4 min 55 sec)

Originally Posted by Clips

A video of a friends TRex 600 with led-lights and Align night blades. It worked and looked cool but unfortunately there is not enough light on the blades. Looks good from beneath but needs more light on top. Still a good idea and something to work on.

Clips

Thanks for sharing, Clips. The LED light can over power the lights on the blade if not regulated. It can cause optical illusion and make one looses orientation. Ask me how I know. I use 3 cell Lipo connects to a brushed speed controller ($5 from HobbyKing) and assign the channel to a rotary dial on my Tx. I can adjust the intensity of the LED light based on the condition. This was posted here a while back. Sorry, I am using my phone and have to ask your friend to do the search.

Hope this helps

Happy night flying

Cheater

[Dr. M]

Nice birds everyone

Originally Posted by Clips

A video of a friends TRex 600 with led-lights and Align night blades. It worked and looked cool but unfortunately there is not enough light on the blades. Looks good from beneath but needs more light on top. Still a good idea and something to work on.

Enjoy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIUEnnCNUGM

Clips

Nothing compares to the brightness of DYI night blades... To ensure consistency, my blades have the same LEDs from the strips that go on the frame and canopy (I harvested them off the prebuilt strips). I also overdrive them just a tiny bit with a resistor slightly under what comes out of the calculation. The effect is a very consistent intensity between the rotor disk and chassis.

[jonny1]

Hello clips. Guess you are the one who recorded my First attempt at night flight then :-D

I soon discovered that the blades was to dim, making it too easy to loose orientation.
Now Im just waiting for the parts to make diy blades.

Taoy: What type of Brushless speed controller do you use?

Sent from my U9200 using Tapatalk 2

[taoY]

Originally Posted by jonny1

Hello clips. Guess you are the one who recorded my First attempt at night flight then :-D

I soon discovered that the blades was to dim, making it too easy to loose orientation.
Now Im just waiting for the parts to make diy blades.

Taoy: What type of Brushless speed controller do you use?

Sent from my U9200 using Tapatalk 2

This is whati used http://www.hobbyking.com/hobbyking/s...idproduct=9090. It is a little bit big for small heli. But not be an issue for 550 size and up. Basically any brushed speed controller should work.

[rkopka]

Originally Posted by taoY

Basically any brushed speed controller should work.

I also tried that on my 600 but it didn't work very well. First the ESCs needed 0% to initialize which is not very comfortable as I only wanted it to be a fixed value. Then the regulation at lower light/throttle was very bad. It even flickered at low values. Maybe I had too intelligent ESCs but my simple ones all are only for 8 Nixx.
In the end I just used ~3 diodes to dim the boom lights.

RK

[Thunder Fighter]

I use the same HK ESC with my night rig and use it on a slider as well. Just have 0 when you plug in and then set the light brightness. The best thing with this setup is that you can set the lights based on ambient light so if you are flying at twilight you can have them up full and back them off to match the blades when it is darker.

//Dennis.

[Clips]

Originally Posted by jonny1

Hello clips. Guess you are the one who recorded my First attempt at night flight then :-D

That's correct! Funny I should meet you here. I thought I was the only Norwegian on the world wide web.



I'm going to try led-lights too but I will start with airplanes first. They are much more comfortable to crash. Won't be until January though as I'm leaving for Thailand pretty soon. Hopefully I'll be flying during the daylight and way to busy with other stuff at night

Clips

[sp00fman]

I also got that brushed ESC to try, but am not using it.
I hope i can make it usable by reprogramming the chip.

It would be a relatively simple program. There are already a few projects running to reprogram the cheap brushless ESC for quadcopter use. Just need the basic parts from that program. PWM input and PWM output algorithm. that is all! And i believe that is partly incorporated in these chips already.
For our use we are just switching a single FET on and off.

Unfortunately the chip is unbranded. I am assuming it is just one of the simplest popular PIC chips, but i will need to trace a few pins to their function and compare to the datasheet. It has 14 pins.

Perhaps it is even easier to build one from scratch. Just the PIC chip and a FET is needed. gets its 5V control power from the servo lead.

As usual my plans are bigger than my time and brainmass.

[rkopka]

Originally Posted by sp00fman

I also got that brushed ESC to try, but am not using it.
I hope i can make it usable by reprogramming the chip.
...
As usual my plans are bigger than my time and brainmass.

So are mine...

Might be easier with one of the RC switches, maybe a kit. The chip could be socketed. As long as a transistor is the switch it should work

RK

[jonny1]

What is the problem with using the esc as it is? I have two brushed esc in the mail for night setup. Hope it will work. If i need to make a new program for it, it will be simpler and faster to build my own controller.
It is a very simple program that is needed for basic pwm dimming.

Sent from my U9200 using Tapatalk 2

[Thunder Fighter]

Originally Posted by jonny1

What is the problem with using the esc as it is? I have two brushed esc in the mail for night setup. Hope it will work.

It will work fine but you need to put it on a channel that you can change during your plug in procedure. The ESC won't arm if it doesn't see zero after being plugged in, so I have it on a slider so I can zero it when I plug in then adjust the brightness to where I want before takeoff or even during flight. No reason you can't put it on a switch if that is all you have on your Tx.

//Dennis.

[Plumbr]

Ok heres my first attempt at making my own blades....
Not to hard. Thanks to everyones input from here......
Running a reg on the canopy LEDs. runing @ 10.5 volts. 12 is too bright!
Im going to get some heat shrink for the batts tomorow.....
Align 523 Blades.
Trex 550E heli.

Align logo is the top or course....... Right hand Blade.....