Lighting up your quad is a great way to let other people see you when racing whilst simultaneously looking like you just stepped out of Tron. If you've ever wanted to slap some LED's on your race drone, here's a tutorial.
If you'd like a handy little summary to see what's involved in adding LED's to a race quad, read on.
Here's what you will need:
- A soldering iron
- Solder
- Tweasers
- Side snips
- Double sided tape
- LED's - Our quad team like to use these
This tutorial uses a Turbo Gremlin as the example quad. You can check out this Flite Test multirotor in our store here.
The first thing to do is locate your pads that will power the LED strip.
After tinning these pads, you'll have to tin the tips of your wires. This will prepare your wires so that they can be soldered to your control board without a problem.
The wires will need to be trimmed so that there isn't an excess of wire trailing to where you want to locate the LED strip.
As with the board pads, you'll need to tin your LED strip pads too. Then, you guessed it, the next step is tinning the wire ends that will stick to the LED pads. Simple!
Make sure you get the correct wire (ground, signal and power) to the correct pad.
Next, slap some double sided tape on your LED and stick it to wherever you want to on your quad.
Now you can go into the Beta Flight software you use to configure your multirotor. You can choose to activate an LED strip in the 'Other Features' drop down menu on the 'Configuration' tab.
You can program your LEDs on another tab of the software. You can choose from a whole bunch of functions. Some give your quad that real 'wow' factor, such as blinking effects. Matt explains a few in the video so do make sure you check that out.
So, there you have it! After you've learned to do this once, you'll have a super useful quad building skill. Being able to add lights to a quad is a fun thing to be able to do. You'll have a great time choosing colours and patterns in the Beta Flight software and then taking your newly decorated Gremlin or similar machine up for its first test flight.
Happy flying!
Article by James Whomsley
Editor of FliteTest.com
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