Best colour to back light A320 main instruments.

After looking at many images and video's of airbus cockpits both day and night, I see a mix of whites, yellows & oranges. Yellow just seems to be the favourble colour for me (Phils A320 overhead won me on that) but was wondering if that would look a little odd on the main instrument panels, such as the capt, centre and F/O panels. Orange look's really neat on the fcu, efis and wings, yellow looks awsom on the overhead, but what ties in on the MIP without the cockpit looking like a rainbow.

Orange appears sensible for the main panels, but yellow just looks awsom, would yellow be an overkill.

An instrument panel LED Light scheme is more complex that it looks, knowing whats best. Is it best to keep the scheme all one colour?

Alex

You need to ba careful when you say yellow, if you want to be sopecific its "amber" kind of half way between orange and yellow, im using amber on the A320 panels and it works well, but with the Airbus looking at photos is a nightmare because LED illumination has been introduced over the past 10 years onto the A320, started with the FCU being amber to match its bigger sister the A330, and recently has been changed to white LED with amber coverings, so there all different.

Obviously different camera and lighting settings can paint an entire different picture of how things look in the flesh, best example is go to airliners.net or jet photos.net and do a cockpit image search for all A330, the A330 has always been amber LED illumination, never anything else and look at the differences between one photo to the next, amazing sometimes.

If your building an A320 pick a specific aircraft in service aircraft, my parts are based on CN-4032+ VQ-BES aircraft, so they feature pure white LED ACP panels and also under glare lighting and all spotlights are also LED now.

Personally, go for amber for the lot, dont forget different brightness settings can also produce a different colour temp :)

The different color are caused by the capture device white balance, they are all amber.

Many thanks for the heads up.

I made a set of speaker panels that go in the left and right MIP panels and has the ability of backlighting. I do agree that amber is the most common colour I see within panels. I do indeed go on airliners.net and search the hundreds of a320 pics and they all have something different about them.

I think amber is suitable, I think I will need about 60 led's, what would be a suitable led to use, and any wiring tips?

Cheers Guys!

Alex

Well this is one of my A320 panels with amber but my camera makes it look like an almost flurecent yellow colour, but side by side to the A330 parts i have its a spot on match

Fujifilm S100 pro is what im using, just set to auto, should take a pic on my phone camera then it looks closer to what it is in the flesh

http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b5...1/DSCF6271.jpg

I'm using 5 mm. 100 degr. Amber leds.
and never use "standard 20 degr. leds" again.
(where I get them from they have only one color of amber)

@Phill: youre panels motivate me every time I see them ;)

Hi Phil, how do you get such even illumination? are you using some sort of light plate? I use LEDs but I get "hot spots".

Regards
Joe Lavery.

Hi Joe, Although I cant speak for phil, from my experience I do understand that it's the type of angle of the led, and the distance between the pcb with led and the actual panel. I had results where if the LED were to close to the panel then I myself got these 'hotspots' but as I moved the led further back the light distributed it'self but had to increase the intensity of the light and add what I took away. I.e the 100 degree lamp will spread the light more than what the 20 degree would which will give you a larger area of light behind the panel as to just 'spots'. This is just my theory from previous experience with back lighting previous panels, but i'm sure phil has his own unique way of achieving such outstanding results.

Cheers

Alex

Some more info on the leds I how I use them.

Type: L-5YACW
Specifications

case: 5mm
emitting colour: yellow amber
wave length: 585-595nm
case colour: water-clear
luminous intensity (mcd): 600
viewing angle: 100°
forward voltage: 2V

http://www.elektronix.nl/na/0/8872/L...0mcd-100°.html
Aantal 1-9: € 0.50
Aantal 10-49: € 0.48
Aantal 50-249: € 0.44
Aantal 250 en meer: € 0.40

http://www.velleman.eu/images/produc...all/l-5xxx.jpg


When the distance between led and panel is 2 cm.
2 cm. between the leds is enough to avoid dark spots.

When the distance between led and panel is 4-5 mm. !
1 cm. between the leds is enough to avoid dark spots.

When the distance between led and panel is more
than 4 cm. its starts getting weaker/darker.

never try passing light thru 2 layers of opal, uneven spots
will appear even when you use twice the amount of leds.

Professional LED lights on the topledsupplier website.