Monday, October 28, 2013

Getting Lit-Up (Land Raider Edition)

Shortly after getting my illuminated Storm Raven done,
I started building my Space Wolves Land Raider with
the cool Forge World doors.  Shortly after starting it though, I decided that I wanted it to be lit up as well.  Whereas with the Raven it was easy to hide the batteries in the flying base, the Land Raider was harder to deal with.


 While it would be easy enough to hide a battery pack in the hold of a Land Raider, I had painted the interior of mine so I would be lighting the interior; a big old battery pack sitting on the floor would be pretty ugly.    I found these battery holders on e-bay:

Each one holds 2 CR 2032's which provides 6.5 Volts or so -- perfect for my uses.  Now where to mount it?  I need the batteries to be accessible so they could be removed/changed without too much fuss.  Ultimately, I decided to hollow out a space on the underside just enough so that the tank would be resting on its treads not on the battery pack. 


I decided to use 4 yellow LED's to light the interior, with 2 on the Mechanicus shrine, one lighting up the control panel opposite the opening side door and one for general lighting.  I used perf board to build a small lighting board for the interior lights to keep everything in the right place.


The headlights are four 3mm white LED's.  For those who are electronically inclined, I wired the yellow LED's in as 2 series pairs each with a 560 ohm resister, for around a 6 mA current draw for the interior.  The headlights are each wired individually with a 1k resister, for around 2 mA each.  I should be able to get around 10 hours of battery life.

Here's the installation



And all lit up


 And the interior

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