1/2500 Lighted TOS Enterprise Diorama WITHDRAWN

[trekriffic]

Only suggestion i have is pit the led's in the model, use zip ties to bundle the wires or tape even, and put the boards in the base.

Yeah. I concur. Still that's a lot of wires to be running up into the model. You'd need to use magnet wire for sure.

[cannon fodder]

But its doable. You could even use led's with fiber optics behind the bussard collectors to simulate the lights. Wouldn't be too hard.

[trekriffic]

But its doable. You could even use led's with fiber optics behind the bussard collectors to simulate the lights. Wouldn't be too hard.

You'd only need one LED behind each bussard too if you colored the ends of the fibers. Have one fatter fiber in the center for main illumination, maybe painted amber on the end, and blue, green, red, orange, and pink smaller diameter tinted fibers around it. For the dome itself one might be able to find some clear acrylic rod if one has a plastics supply store, like TAP Plastics, in the neighborhood. Or a piece of leftover clear spure woudl do too.
Find something at or close to the correct diameter and clamp a short length in your dremel chuck and turn it like on a lathe. You could file and sand to a dome shape then polish with finer grits of sandpaper until it's smooth. Once it was smooth you'd have to carefully cut the dome off the rod and hollow it out with with a small round router bit, a really small one, mounted in the dremel. It would be painstaking, tedious work but it could be done.

[slawton]

I probably should have explained what I intended to do.

For the navigation beacons, I bought the big circuit board. This board will service a chain of series LEDs (as long as the power supply voltage exceeds the sum of the voltage drops across the LEDs) without needing a resistor (it will supply 20 mA current). It also has a tunable blink rate. In this way, I could put 4 tiny LEDs (2 white on the bottom, 1 Red & 1 Green on the top) producing high brightness and blinking at exactly the rate I want. I could also bring extra blinky lights to the nacelles. Not having this board inside the model isn't a disaster (it would only require 1 extra wire into the model), but there are alternatives. I can use a single blinking LED and fiber optic to the navigation beacons (would not be as bright and would not have control of the blink rate), use a 555 timer circuit, etc.

For the nacelles, I planned on having a translucent dome cap (from a fountain soda lid). Inside, there would be a number of fiber optics leading towards the dome. To achieve a spinning effect, I would chase the lights around in a circle, as shown in the picture below (sequencing from 1 to 6):



I figured I'd need at least 12 lights, more would be even better, but these fiber optics would not all fit through the nacelle pylon, so at a minimum, the tiny LEDs and fiber optics would need to be placed in the nacelles. The smaller circuit board turns on/off 6 LEDs in a sequence. Here is the circuit diagram (where the 6 triangles with a vertical line on the end are the LEDs):



In this case, only 5 wires (#'s 3, 5, 6, 4 & 2) would need to fit through the pylon (which is doable for magnetic wires). My question is whether 1 board can support 2 sets of 6 LEDs or if I need to use 2 of the small circuit boards. Using 1 board could:

• Make the LEDs too dim
  Draw too much power and burn out the circuit board
  Make the light intensity different from LED to LED

These small boards could fit inside the saucer, vertically inside the secondary hull (near the neck) or possibly in the front of the secondary hull (may require some sanding of the board's corners).

[slawton]

I received an alternate solution for the larger circuit board, but life has thrown me some curves (which really seems to be the norm for my life) -- my vehicle needed repairs, my daughter's brakes went out & had an accident (no one was hurt), a child has kidney stones in both kidneys & my job has called me in to work the weekend (it was 3 days off for me & I was hoping to take some additional time off). My son's birthday is tomorrow, 2 of my daughter's are playing a powder-puff football game this week, I have to help with Tae Kwon Do instruction and it looks like I'll be working extra hours for at least a couple of weeks.

I won't be able to meet the dead-line, so I'll have to withdraw. I will still continue to post updates to this build when I can.

I wish the remaining contestants good luck!

[Xen]

Please PM me if you want this thread copied to another section.

[Xen]

The thread has now been copied to the 1/2500 section.

https://www.allscaletrek.com/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=2208