Mini-Titan e325 Night Flying LED Setup Progress

I am working to convert my ACE Mini-Titan e325 to a night-flying setup. Since winter is on the way, the only time I’ll be able to fly is later on in the day when the sun is low, or gone so this is a perfect excuse to play with lighting.

I purchased 2 feet of green and blue LED strip lighting from a vendor at the 2010 NEAT Fair while purchasing a Blade mSR and some extra batteries for it. The LED strips can be cut down to sections consisting of 3 LEDs and require a 12 volt power supply. These strips can also be found that require a 5 volt supply. The 12 volt powered strips work great on radio controlled models which use 3S Lithium Polymer battery packs. Because LEDs are low power draw, even a lot of LEDs won’t make for a huge impact in your flight times if you run them off of your main flight pack. In my setup I use a male JST style connector on the canopy which makes connecting and disconnecting the LEDs for the canopy a simple and quick matter. The female JST connector’s wires run to and tie in with the power lines which run the helicopter tail boom lighting. These are connected to the power connector for the brushless motor speed controller.

The LED strips come with an adhesive 3M tape backing which will pretty much stick to anything. To prep the Mini-Titan canopy I scrubbed it down with 90 percent rubbing alcohol, then i scrubbed it down again and wiped it down, then one more time for good measure. I spent a little bit of time placing strips on different locations of the canopy and finally decided on a layout for the LED strip lights. Once set I cut the strips down to length for each location, removed the paper tape from the adhesive backing and then pressed the strips onto the helicopter canopy.

Once all the strips were down I soldered on all the wiring to connect the LED strips to each other. Soldering LED strips isn’t that hard to do with the right equipment and experience but if you haven’t soldered before I’d recommend practicing your soldering skills a lot before attempting this. There are exposed solder pads at each end of every set of 3 LEDs on the strip which allows you to solder the strips in parallel to each other. I was a bit concerned that soldering the tape while it was stuck to the canopy would melt the canopy at points, but it is a thermoplastic and did not have any problems with the short soldering times required. I used a 45 watt soldering iron to first prime the pads with a blob of solder, and tin the ends of the bridging leads, I then placed the tinned wire atop the hemisphere shaped blob on the soldering pad, heating both till they fused then let the joint cool normally. The last step of the soldering process takes about 2 seconds. You can see the pads in detail in the pictures below, and also how I routed the wires around and took advantage of solder pads being everywhere on the LED strip lighting. Just mind your polarity and you will be good!

That’s all there was too it. It took me about 3 hours last night to do all the work, but that was while watching TV and occasionally plugging the strips in after each addition to make sure everything was still working good and that I had not created any solder shorts which would cause unfortunate problems on the electrical system and batteries for the helicopter.

The results of this work are pretty good and can be seen in the photos below. You’ll also see I have some red and white LED’s in the back. I am planning to replace these with longer strips of alternating colors (red/white or purple/white) perhaps helical wound around the tail boom so I did not detail the installation of these, though it’s pretty much the same; Clean, place and solder. I also have a 1 Watt green Luxeon Star in the front mounted inside of the canopy. The Mini-Titan’s battery tray almost perfectly fits an old square style Luxeon Star board and with the LED right in front of a canopy vent it gets plenty of fresh moving air which means I didn’t have to add any additional heatsinking for the LED.

The setup is very bright, we took some video of it tonight and it over drove the video camera. I didn’t mess around with the video recorders settings too much but I’m sure it could have been adjusted to better tone down the lights. While the lights are extremely bright in person as well, they are also well defined and don’t turn into a ‘glowing glob’. Here’s the short video I made of this setup.

Please let me know what you think of the canopy setup for this helicopter, or share some info on your own setup by commenting below or using the contact form to send me a personal message.