LED strips or Glow wire?

[Rogman88]

What are the advantages of each? I would assume LED's may be brighter. I have a strip of green and a strip of yellow LED's coming from hobby city because the reviews said that they were brighter. I will make some DIY night blades with the LEDs as well. But I am still intrigued by the whole glow wire thing. What do you recommend.

[oteskate]

Hey Rogman. Well, to simply answer your question, LED's will definitley be brighter than glow string no matter what. I used glow string for awhile, along with glow sticks on the skids and unless I kept it close to me, I couldn't tell what orientation I was in half the time. I used the green and yellow colors since those were the brightest of the options I had. I eventually stopped flying at night because I just never felt confident that the glow string was doing the job.

Xerogear makes some REALLY bright LED systems that you may love. You can actually set it up so that you can use a RX channel to adjust the brightness from your TX. They're stuff is super bright and flexible enough to wind around the boom. It's LED's on a flexible strip. They come in many different colors and are quite durable from what I've seen. I would highly suggest looking into them at www.xerogear.com. You can even get a landing light that mounts to the underside of the heli so that you can see the ground on landing, too.. No more guessing where the ground is.

[flyinfool]

The glowire and LEDs each have a different look. While LEDs are brighter it is very possible to be too bright. You would be surprised at how bright Glowire can be with quality stuff.
Mose people run the Align and assume that all wire is the same. I assure you all wire is not equal.
My heli with Glowire was said to be "to bright" by many that have seen it.

The brightest wire out there is from www.glowire.com using their high brightness wire and the F2 driver. It is easily double the brightness of the Align glow wire system.

I now have both wire and LEDs on my night ship.

I like both systems.

[clkandcjk]

I really wanted to use glow wire because I like that neon look. I ordered some from Hobby City and was very disappointed in brightness.Later, I read that the Align is brighter, but I had already ordered the LED strips from Hobby City. Last night I had my first real night flight with DIY blades and LED strips. It was the first time I felt confident enough in my helis visibility at night, to relax. I used yellow wrapped around the boom, blue on the top and sides of the canopy, and green at the very bottom of the sides of the canopy. I used blue and green leds to make my blades. One thing to be aware of with the LEDS from the Hobby City LED strips is their viewing angle is very limited. I put one of the LEDs on the tip of my blade and it cannot be seen from above or below, only from the side. It did not seem to cause any issues when flying. I almost think it might have help, but I am not sure. Sorry, I seem to be rambling on. I am just so excited about finally getting a usable night rig set up. I have been working on this for a couple of months now trying different things. Bottom line, I would avoid the glow wire from Hobby City.

[Mr.HillBilly]

I hooked up a buddys LEDs from HobbyCity and compered them brightness to the XeroGear and they looked about the same to me, I only tried them on 3S.

[RS]

I would definately go with LED's over Glowire,

LED's are AWESOME !!!!! :-)

[Michael211]

As mentioned before, it depends on who you get your glowire from... all glowire is NOT created equal unfortunately!

I haven't tried glowire from glowire.com yet, but I've bought several heli glowire kits from an Ebay seller located in Hong Kong and his wire is VERY good and bright! A wire kit I bought off Ebay from a different seller in China turned out to be crap though and sits unused and unwanted in a box here. The difference between the good wire and crap wire is brightness of the wire when powered AND I notice that the good wire holds it's shape when you bend it while the crap wire has no backbone to speak of (must not have much of a center core wire in it I guess; I haven't thought to cut it to see what inside).

Also the diameter of glowire makes a difference in how clean it looks at night when lit. The thicker the glowire the more diffused the light seems to be.... I recommend 2.3mm diameter wire for best effect and easiest application.

I've seen the LED based XeroGear stuff used on electric delta foamie models and it's blindingly bright IMO! Also the pinpoints of light aren't as smooth looking as continuous gowire. And finally, you can learn how to splice glowire to make up runs with different colors... for my heli's tails, I start with red spiraling around the tail tube then when I reach the horizontal fin I cut the red and splice in blue to trace the horizontal fin out then cut the blue and splice red in again to continue spiraling to the vertical tailfin then once again cut the red and splice blue in to trace out the vertical tailfin... it gives a very nice colorful effect!

I'm getting my X-Cell all ready for a night-fly Nov 7th, I'll try to make sure somebody gets me some good digital pics of it this time so I can post them! I'm setting up a new canopy with blue and yellow glowire today and I have some white light tubes I'm hoping to get in the mail Saturday morning to put on the landing skids to illuminate them as well!

Regards!

- Michael

[garby]

LED'ssssss all the way, Just finished this one, took for ever to solder up.

[Mr.HillBilly]

If you have a link to the brighter glow wire I would love to take a look at it. I would not mind running both myself.

[flyinfool]

For the high brightness wire

and for the F2 driver

They do not have these items in kit for so you will need to order them alacart.
If you call them up they can put anything you want together in a kit form so that you do not have to do any soldering.

My recommendation is to use only 5-10 feet of wire per driver.

[Rogman88]

Got in the hobbycity LED's and man those things are bright on 3S 360mah battery!!! I can't wait to stick em on the heli! I wished I'd have gotten one more color though to separate the top and bottom of the canopy. I may order some off ebay from an american distributer so I can get some quick@

[Mr.HillBilly]

Thanks for the info.

Can glow wire be dimmed or is it always on and off?

As for colors I run canopy green, tail tube yellow, tail fins blue, then I run red on the bottom of canopy and bottom of the horizontal fin.

I think the the extra colors help me keep things straight. If you want to get real fancy put some white LEDs under the fuel tank so you can see how much fuel you have left.

[flyinfool]

Aqua is the brightest Glowire color since that is the natural color. ALL other colors are made by coloring the insulation so the farther a color is from Aqua in the spectrum the less bright it will be.

As far as dimming the glow wire, I never tried it. You would have to experiment changing the input voltage to the inverter to see what effect that might have.

[AverageJoe]

I was just looking at the Glowire site. They state that brightness is a function of the frequency of the driver. So is longevity. So it could be tough to control the brightness.

[flyinfool]

Frequency has the biggest effect on the brightness.

BUT

Depending on the design of the oscillator in the inverter, The frequency may change with input voltage, there by changing the brightness of the wire.

[barneyuk]

hi RS is this a kit or one you made yourself ? were in the uk can i source the parts?
Barneyuk

[geoavia]

I prefer LED's for sure!

They are better visible from a distance, but require good positioning.

Here is my first night flight with leds:


I bought theese strips here:
http://hobbyking.com/hobbycity/store...0&ParentCat=58

[highland flyer]

Hi BarneyUK. You can source the LED strips from BRC Hobbies at a sensible price.

[TheBum]

The last fun fly I went to, three of us did night flying. I was using XeroGear LED strips and the other two were using glow wire. The LED strips were significantly brighter, even running on 2S. I'm really glad I didn't decide to go to 3S.

[Pod-n-Boomer]

Originally Posted by RS

I would definately go with LED's over Glowire,

LED's are AWESOME !!!!! :-)

That's the cleanest arrangement I've seen. Not over kill, just artistic and simple.