Hi! Noob lighting question.

[77kustoms]

I've looked around and I might be missing it so I am throwing it up here in hopes of finding answers.

I am building the 18" Enterprise reissue and obviously want to light it.
I plan on having the base hold a few 60's style switches to make it look as though it's part of the bridge itself. I would like to have each On/Off operate seperate circuits under their own power. The switches aren't the problem as I have built a few basic on off LED for random projects.

The goal is :
1 switch for Cabin and Hull which is not a problem
I have a pot for the DLM kit for the Bussard collectors

And here is where my trouble comes in
I am looking for a means of wiring fading nav and double strobe on one switch from a 9v power source. I guess I am looking for a shopping list of capacitors and resistors basically. I have a couple 555 and a 556 timer(s) I know I will most likely need a few pots for my board as well. I tried using the schematic for the NX-01 in one of the stickys to no avail as I am not sure if it is a 9v system or if I ran something wrong on my bread board as there is no power to my 1.5mm red and green LEDs.
Any help would be most appreciated!

[opal_1970]

Hi there,

The best start for finding out what you need is to plan how many LEDs you want/need and use a LED calculator to find out how best to hook them up.

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

for example, If you are running a 9volt system, then you could put 6 red LEDs in a parallel circuit as each of the LEDs need about 1.5 volt. Remember not to mix LED in the same circuit, that can produce "odd" behavior or even burn out your LEDs. If you are not doing anything fancy, 9 volts is (in my opinion) quite a bit. I like to run things at around 5 to 6 volts.

A little trick I learned, typical Star Trek ships have a red and a green nav light, that both bink at the same time. If you are using Fiber Optics to carry the light you can reduce your LEDs by using only one white LED set to blink and just use a Green and Red edding marker to "paint" the LED-side of the FO cable.

There are also quite a few kits out there, varying greatly in functionality and price. I can recommend Starling Technologies, they have a nice Photon torbedo light/sound effect that also has an output for the strobe and nav lights, and will not cost you an arm and a leg. Not that the more expensive sets are overly priced, they generally have more functions, all wires cut to fit, etc. I like to do all my electric myself, I use an arduino board (25$) to create the code and then I export that to a small microcontroller (2$), which I then hook up to the model.