Need Lighting assistance Space Battleship Yamato

CSLemke · Post by **CSLemke** » Wed Oct 09, 2013 2:14 pm

Alright, I'm a newbie to lighting, well not really, I put pre-made lighting kits into models before but this is a bit different.

I want to light my 1:500 scale Space Battleship Yamato...
I've seen the one for sale in the store, but it's wrong for what I want.

Here's what I want to do:

Lights always on steady:
- 3 light green command tower lights
- 1 light green for the 3rd Bridge (hull bridge)
- 2 Yellow lights for the port and starboard observation decks
- 1 Amber light for the hull flight deck (just fwd of the secondary engines)
(I'm scratch building the ramp and interior flight deck)

'flickering' or 'pulsing' lights:
Yellow/orange color
2 for the smaller secondary engines
1 large for the main thruster

Build-up Wave Motion Gun
lights build up to bright orange glows for a moment then 'bursts' really bright to a White/Blue color.

When the Wave Motion Gun is in build-up mode the engine lights go off and the other lights all dim to 50%

Can anyone help?!?!?!

tetsujin · Post by **tetsujin** » Wed Oct 09, 2013 6:03 pm

How are you with programming? My suggestion would be a little Arduino plus a few resistors and a bit of coding. You've got few enough LEDs that you could probably drive the whole thing without adding a dedicated LED driver IC - but adding one if necessary wouldn't be a huge issue.

CSLemke · Post by **CSLemke** » Wed Oct 09, 2013 7:34 pm

Given instructions I can work out most things, but to date I've only worked with ready made lighting sets.

frollsshontay · Post by **frollsshontay** » Thu Oct 10, 2013 12:57 am

The madman lighting kit will do most of your effects for the same price that it will cost you to purchase and program a chip. The steady lights are not that hard- you can get pre wired and resistored LEDs on ebay pretty cheaply these days.

CSLemke · Post by **CSLemke** » Thu Oct 10, 2013 6:49 am

the only problem is that the colors are incorrect, the command lights are white not green, no lights fot the 3rd bridge or the 2 yellow observation decks, i need another light for the flight deck, i can ive with the red engine lights, but the WMG should charge to orange, and fire blue/white. i know im being a stickler but im real doing some mods on this kit and really want to do it right.

Grumpy Popeye · Post by **Grumpy Popeye** » Thu Oct 10, 2013 9:22 am

I started to film my build of the 1:500 Space Battleship Yamato, I got through most of the main lighting and was just about to get into the Madman lighting kit when my responsibilities in the RCN took me back out to sea. If you look for John Beaulieu in Youtube you will find my build quickly enough.

CSLemke · Post by **CSLemke** » Thu Oct 10, 2013 9:42 am

Thanks! Ill check that out!

tetsujin · Post by **tetsujin** » Thu Oct 10, 2013 9:49 am

frollsshontay wrote:The madman lighting kit will do most of your effects for the same price that it will cost you to purchase and program a chip.

Pre-built lighting kits have their uses, but this is flat-out crazy talk. It does not cost $65 to buy and program a microcontroller or even (when necessary) build a more elaborate circuit around it. What you're paying for is the convenience of having someone else do that work for you... And depending on your skills, that may be entirely worth it. But to say it costs the same to do it yourself is absurd. Observe...

Boom. $20 Arduino, small enough to fit inside most starship kits, with built-in USB, so you can write program code to it with no additional hardware.

Or if you're lighting several kits and want the per-model cost to average out lower, you could do one of these per model and pair it with one of these to connect to the PC. ($10 per Arduino Pro Mini, $15 for the adaptor board)

Or if you're ready to put on the man pants, you could get this to write program code to AVR microcontrollers and buy just the microcontrollers (at about $1-$5 each, depending on what type you get and where you get it) to embed in each project.

So, yeah, nowhere near $65. Though, again, to be fair, the lighting kit is more than a microcontroller. Among other things, it sounds like the LED it supplies for the main gun is really bright (without knowing how bright, exactly, it's hard to make a fair comparison here) - and the rest of the LEDs are, I expect, driven by regulated current-sink drivers to keep the current supply to each LED at its proper level. So you might add one of these to drive the regular LEDs and then depending on how bright you want the main gun to be, there's different options...

If you want the main gun really bright then there's this thing, but if you're OK with maybe not blinding people then you could go with one or more of these or these...

So Arduino + LED driver IC + ship LEDs + main gun LEDs is probably somewhere around $40-$45 total. It's up there (and Sparkfun is not the cheapest place to buy some of these parts) but still a comfortable margin cheaper than the lighting kit.

frollsshontay · Post by **frollsshontay** » Thu Oct 10, 2013 3:04 pm

Ok, fair cop- I was considering Australian prices for arduinos and as an alternative, buying offshore, shipping them over here. Then there's the process of learning about programming arduinos, and then the debugging process ( and a boxing bag for when it doesn't work

). But I take your point about the cost of the components.

Ben

Madman Lighting · Post by **Madman Lighting** » Mon Oct 21, 2013 6:34 pm

Well, if you are really going to be fussy about colors for things I _can_ make a semi-custom kit for your Yamato.

PM me and let me know if you're interested.

Styrofoam_Guy · Post by **Styrofoam_Guy** » Sun Oct 27, 2013 10:24 pm

For all the steady on lights I would get a white LED for everything and then use the clear paints for the various colours. This way all the steady LEDs would have the same voltage and current draw and would use the same resistor.

The flashing lights and stuff I would do with an arduio or some other programmable PIC (ie PICAXE)