My Halloween light-up pumpkin

Im really proud of this mess.. basically 3 days ago i couldnt tell the difference between a led and a neon sign..its been my first week at mycockpit.org and with all the help you people gave me, i decided to move a bit forward.. i had a couple of extra panels from cockpitsonic (the first ones i think), and since im waiting for warvet pedestal, i decided to take a change and "sacrifice" a couple of leds i had and one panel.

The leds are hudge!..10mm amber..so i drilled 12 holes, and there you go......my main problem right now is.... i soldered one 330ohm resistor to each led, ive done my math and it gave me 12 leds for a 12v imput..fair enough, but wouldnt it be simple to wire them all in parallel and place only one resistor for the all chain...or that wouldnt work...?....cause lets face it... its a damn mess what i made!..i would be deeply thankfull if someone could explain me with all your experience how can i do what i just did but in a much order and clean way....cause the amount of wires is insane...

The other problem is..i get a lot of dissipated light!..so...most of the light is going away from the panel, instead of being focused at some specific points, so im planning to use 3mm leds instead, and probably 3 times as much per panel in order not to end up with areas with less light......you can see at the pics that i have fadded light points in the panel..not good!..

anyway..thanks for the patience and i'll be posting my progresses...thanks to all of you for making this a bit more real! cheers

Alex

P.S. ive manage to configure my first switches with iocards as well..hopefully the cockpit will start to move a bit faster

I would place some reflective foil behind the bulbs to keep the light on the board. Make sure it does not contact any wires!
try mounting the LEDs all on a PC board and then use a PC board etching kit from radio shack to make all the ground lines connect. then you can put all the resistors right next to each other and run the traces out to each LED as needed.

Make a sandwich of it. Something like this:
(Sorry about the picture quality, It is late and I just scribbled and scanned it.)

You need to move the LED's back from the panel. The hot spots are caused by them being too close. If you move them back the light from them will 'spread' and give a more even lighting.
You could also try AndyT's suggestion of a diffuser behind the panel and then attach the LED's to this (or even a little distance behind, as per above).

I hope that this will help you. ;-)

Skywatch

Another secret is to Flatten the tips of the led. then using fine sand paper roughen up all the led,s so they have a frosted look to them.


This will cause the light to dispurse more evenly.

The reason you woulnd't put all those in parallel with one resistor is that the amount of current going through the single resistor would cause it to get way too hot and catch fire.

Looks to me like you are using 1/2 watt resistors, so if you still want to use the 10mm led's you would need like a 1.25watt resistor for 10 of them.

Anyway, looks really good for a first attempt. And as you can see as soon as you insert switches things are really going to get interesting :)

Great job though.

Trev

Thanks everyone for the wonderfull advices!..ill try to do that, anyway, ive already bought a couple of protoboards, so ill plan carefull all those drawings and try to figure out a proper solution, ive also ordered 100 ultrabright yellow leds..3mm ones, instead of the hudge 10mm, i plan to use double as much per panel, maybe that with all your ideas toguetter will help me out on having a much better light distribution.

The drawing was perfect andy! thanks mate

Cheers to all

Alex

fantastic work that you have done there. great stuff.

but please try one little thing that wont cost much.

just try it..and you will be very very very happy.

grab a couple of clear car indicator/ tail lamps

mount them an inch or so behind so they light the entire back of panel.

looks much like the real glow. leds are great..but you will love this!

another idea to flatten the tips of your leds..just clip them off with wire strippers.

good luck.