I wanted to do a mod for the CH3-R that would really stand out! I found some really bright T1 LEDs and made some acrylic parts that would fit inside the opening in the leg. I will post the dimension for them and may even make them available as a product. There is a cutout that is the profile of the LED in the part. I sanded the flats of the parts and surrounded the outside of the parts with white tape, so they glow when the LEDs are on. The LEDs take 15mA each so the total draw on the battery is only 90mA. I may connect them to the Atom and have them flash in a pattern, but for now they are always on, and are very visible even in daylight. The 12 LEDs in a row are a new product we are adding today. It’s a cool Night Rider KIT car type display. Although in the images the LEDs are all on, they actually scroll back and forth. I will be adding a tutorial for the mod when I can get the pictures taken. It was a fun and really cool addition.
OMG, this is SO DANG COOL, Jim! Now you have gone and really done it… I am going to have to use these new legs on an Octapod. I’ll build a hexapod or octapod just to use these legs and the lights.
Hmmm, now how inexpensively can I put together a hexapod? Hmmmmm…
I originally wanted to go with tricolor LEDs to make them whatever color I wanted. But I could’t find them in the T1 package. To keep things simpler I opted to go with single color red, although green would be equally wicked looking IMHO.
Man, I loved the legs, they’re so cool!! and now, you managed to get them cooler!!! I think I would have prefered bright green, but red is nice too. I wanted to do one, and now I am diying to do it!! wow!
where do you get LEDs like that? I would like to puit somme on my BRAT…
I got the LEDs from a place called www.superbrightleds.com They are the RL3-R5014 Red 3mm LEDs. I got 36 of them for $0.54 each, so bout $20.00. I’m not dissapointed at all. I’m going to reshoot the photos, using a tripod and manual focus. Thanks…
I actually had a cylon type LED bar in the works as a far future project. I was going to use a 4029 counter, a 4028 decoder, and a 555 timer to make a 10 LED one. I come back after thanksgiving break to see a better one as a product!
My one issue is there are very few details on the bar. Is the speed adjustable? What is the current source per LED (if I wanted to mod my own) My own curiousity also wonders how it works. I see only one 8-pin chip, plus LEDs and resistors. This does not seem enough to control 12 LEDs.
Not to mention the legs. That really is one really wicked looking hex. I want to see what it looks like with the LEDs off too, I bet the semi translucent lexan is pretty cool by all by itself. Yea, I haven’t seen a tricolor 3mm LED, there are a wide selection of 5mm ones, so if it could be made to fit, that would be even better.
We will be adding more info. It was a bit rushed to get the stuff on line. The difference between this device and a discrete version is it actually controls the brightness to gradually dim them. It makes the cool trailing led effect. The thing is made with an 8 pin microcontroller. But only 4 of the pins are used for the 12 LED’s. I will let you think about it for a while before I tell you the secret.
The speed is not adjustable, but you can enable it or disable it with pulses. Pulses = off, no pulses = on.
I think I figured it out, it uses diode AND gates. I’m not sure about only using 4 pins, but if the LEDs are laid out in a matrix, and something could provide an oscillating ground, then I could see the micro only needing to alternate four pins, since only one group of LEDs could be on at a time. Hence there would be three groups of four LEDs. Possibly one pin on the micro is the control, and the other is the drive for oscillation? Since we need two for power and it has 8. More diode logic would be needed for the oscillations but since you can pick trigger voltages for diodes and voltage drops from resistors, you could make three steps from a sine wave that way. It now doesn’t matter if the micro makes the sine, or an RC circuit does. The whole reason the micro would be needed is for the fade effect, which can’t really be simulated with simple circuits (without making a proceeding fade as well).
This design is not really common online. Most use either the 4017 (decade counter) or the 74164 (shift register) to drive the LEDs, one per pin. The LM3914 bar graph driver, over driven in dot mode by an op-amp is another design. The design I wanted to use was closest to the 4017 method, mainly since I have a bucket of 4028s. However, none of these methods do the unidirectional fading. Probably, I should suck it up and apply my new PIC skills here, making something very similar to the the sinewinder, but using resistors and pin for the oscillations. I could get a 16 pin PIC, say one of the 16F series, and use that for nearly as large an array as I wanted (6-20 LEDs).
Wow. That really is a much better arrangement than anything I came up with. My gut feeling was that the two in series would light, when trying to light the third, but a simple breadboard test proves that wrong.
With only 6 pins it says one can drive 30 LEDs (I think the pdf has an error, since 6 is listed twice, should be 7 for 42) which would let me get away with only an 8-pin micro. Should be a fun project.
I have located RBG leds through my chinese neighbor. He does a lot of led locating for me i like to play with them. I can get both 3mm and 5mm and they will work out to be in the neighborhood of $.085 for the 5mm, and $1.00ea. for the 3mm. Final pricing can’t be determined till the actually get to me.
Let me know which size you guys would rather have, and i’ll order them in. It will take about two weeks to get them.
Whats the mcd and angle. I chose some really bright ones for the project. 15° and 5000 mcd. The legs are vissibly lit up even in a lighted room. Much dimmer would only be good in darker rooms.
5000mcd @ 15 degree for the 3mm, 5000mcd @ 20degree for the 5mm. I’m still working out the deal, right now I don’t like the quantity they want me to order. No big deal though, I’ve played this game before, they always do this where they want you to order three times what you ask for.
