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So Ive been thinking of ways to put light onto my army entire but LEDs are too thick and i want to have multipul colors on some models. So I came up with a solution, Fiber Optics. Basically its light carried through a special bendable wire or cable and it shines brightly out the end of it. Thus i made myself a challange, Find a way to light up my army without cutting huge holes to fit leds and only using as much light as i need.

I just ordered some FOwire and is should be here in 2-3 weeks!

I ordered .25mm, .5mm, .75mm, 1mm, 1.5mm, and 2mm with 50 feet of each

Already have the led's,

Light Blue/Yellow/White ribbon
And the rest are solid colors
Red
White
Blue
Green
Yellow

I plan to use the ribbon for sparks and "electricity" on my thunderhammers. The red is for eyes and and ill put a red led into my drop pods/inside my transports "to improve night vision of course" and also for my meltas so they glow.White is for just general highlighting under armour as well as inside gun barrel. Blue is for the electricity also, and for lines on force weapons/power weapons to make them glow. Green is for any plasma weapons/toxic waste etc. And finally the yellow is for my bases to make it so the Mica sparkles more and it looks as though my marines are wading through gold.

I will also be rebasing all my models to accommodate the leds and will run wires to the batteries for each unit to power them. *I plan on putting the batteries in the drop pod and running detachable 3ft wires to each marine, ive never made it much further than 3ft from my pods in a game and the ability to detatch it allows me to take it off the board. Characters and vehicles will have custom bases and their own power units. Im still calculating out how much power i will need to run each unit/model. Another thing i plan to do is make the lights dimable so i can adujst the brightness of them based on how dark the gameroom, table, and background are.

So does anyone else use fiber optics and has any suggestions or tips so I can avoid some problems that would be great.

Also as i cant find much on it I will be taking pictures and writing a tutorial along the way.

Keep us posted. I'm very interested in this thread because I'm going to use fiber in my Stormraven I'm working on.

I have use regular 3mm leds on a drop pod before and there is plenty of room on the bottom for batteries.

Good luck

Gundor2 wrote:
Keep us posted. I'm very interested in this thread because I'm going to use fiber in my Stormraven I'm working on.

I have use regular 3mm leds on a drop pod before and there is plenty of room on the bottom for batteries.

Good luck

Yeah im trying to fit between 2-3 9v's in the drop pod. I think its looking like Ill be building some bases for them to hide it.

Good god - why 9vs? That's way too much.

edit: Especially 2-3 of them!

How many lights do you think you will use on the drop pod? Led's don't take that much power. 3v Is all that you will need unless you are using red ones. They will need a resistor being that they are usually 2.4v. Look into using something smaller for a power source like a watch battery(which is 3v most times) or something. You will need some room under the base too for all of the fiber cables. I ran 4 leds in my drop pod and used 2AAA batteries. More than enough power.

Keep in mind too what kind of switches you will me using. Here's the place I went to get mine. http://www.modeltrainsoftware.com/ . They have a ton of useful stuff for lighting up minis.

rigeld2 wrote:
Good god - why 9vs? That's way too much.

edit: Especially 2-3 of them!

I figure an average of 10 ultrabright leds per battery and at 2 leds per model minimum thats 20leds plus 2 blinking leds more in the pod. I also want the leds to be able to go from bright to dim.

**Note some models may have up to 5 leds each. I want color variation with the lights**

It might be to much power but im not sure yet, I've never build custom lights before so this is kind of an experiment as well as a project.

If you have any suggestions for running the power to the leds/the amount of power needed to power the leds, please let me know. Like i said, this is a challenge for me haha.

And one red led per model, 2 in drop pod so 12 reds per drop pod. I also want to be able to remove one led at a time and not mess up my circuit. The wires will be stored in the drop pods and the leds will be in the bases of the models *im running the FOwire through the model instead of wire*

And as far as switches go i was thinking of using micro dimmers mounted in the drop pod, would that work?

http://led.linear1.org/led.wiz

A single 9V battery is just too much. To get things down to 2-3V (what most LEDs, even high output ones, need) you have to throw some big resistance at it. Big resistance means lots of heat. Instead of dealing with that just use smaller batteries. You might have to connect a few 3v batteries in parallel to get enough amps, but you still won't need 9V batteries.

rigeld2 wrote:
http://led.linear1.org/led.wiz

A single 9V battery is just too much. To get things down to 2-3V (what most LEDs, even high output ones, need) you have to throw some big resistance at it. Big resistance means lots of heat. Instead of dealing with that just use smaller batteries. You might have to connect a few 3v batteries in parallel to get enough amps, but you still won't need 9V batteries.

Right on thanks!

12 LEDs is 6 amps. You'll get around 200mAh per coin battery, so 3 in series would give you an hour of runtime. That seems bad.

You'll have to figure out how best to power 3v@6A. Likely a rechargeable would be best.

rigeld2 wrote:
12 LEDs is 6 amps. You'll get around 200mAh per coin battery, so 3 in series would give you an hour of runtime. That seems bad.

You'll have to figure out how best to power 3v@6A. Likely a rechargeable would be best.

See thats what i was trying to avoid, i would like them to run for 8-10 hours per battery

High voltage isn't the way to fix that.
High mAh is.

rigeld2 wrote:
High voltage isn't the way to fix that.
High mAh is.

ok so more wired in series versus more power? Sorry if I sound new at wiring, Im a chef not an electriction lol.

Exactly. Or batteries with more amps. You can get 3v batteries with over 1000mah.. but you'd still need 6 of those for one hour of running.

rigeld2 wrote:
Exactly. Or batteries with more amps. You can get 3v batteries with over 1000mah.. but you'd still need 6 of those for one hour of running.

Can i do it with a 2000mAh 3.7v rechargable battery? I have a ton of those laying around.

Sure - that'd give you about 3 hours. I'd test build on your desk before putting into a model though - so you can know how much heat stuff gives off.

rigeld2 wrote:
Sure - that'd give you about 3 hours. I'd test build on your desk before putting into a model though - so you can know how much heat stuff gives off.

Of course, I dont want to melt the models/light the table on fire haha.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Theres also a video floating around on youtube where a guy uses some fiber optics in a demolisher cannon turret.

ghilliemarine wrote:
Sorry if I sound new at wiring, Im a chef not an electriction lol.

I am an electrician. This is about electronics.