Wiring a switch with a LED in it....

[David Rogers]

Hi,

I have now attached a number of basic toggle and momentary switches to my Hagstrom Board.....

.....and the time has come to wire up a switch that has a LED built into it.

SPEC FROM THE SWITCH PACKAGING:

"The LED lights when the switch is placed in the ON position".

There are 3 connectors on this switch .... so how do I wire this up ?

1 Wire from a connector to the Hagstrom input.....

1 Wire from a connector to the Hagstrom ground....

.....what do I connect to the 3rd terminal / connector (presubly its for the LED ?).

Thanks in advance for my next lesson in wiring switches !

[steveeverson]

I guess it's for the led power- probably 5volts, but may need to have a resistor in line to drop it down as some leds are 3v. you can get a suitable power supply from maplin or i think a PC atx supply has a 5v rail on it.
hope that helps
steve

[Geremy Britton]

yes - you connect 2 wires from this extra terminal to hold the power source in circuit

[kiek]

Hi,
Just for information: this has nothing to do with the Hagstrom board. The KE72 only provides key-strokes to the Flight simulator, it does not give you state information from the Flight simulator needed to control leds.

So you can only hard wire a led in a switch to one of it's fixed positions, but be careful, that will not always mean that the led is synchronised with the switch with led in your Flight simulator panel....
If you want the latter you need interface boards like the ones from Opencockpits or FSBUS, that will give you a bidirectional interface to FS9/X.

Regards,
Nico

[David Rogers]

Hi,

I think I didn't make a few points clear in my thread;

- I thoroughly understand that the LED will not be linked in anyway to FS, and that the Hagstrom is purely an input device for switches.... (I've been using the Hagstrom for a couple of weeks now).

- I am purely just looking to have the LED light up when the switch is 'made'. (As I will map this switch to the 'z' key and will use only this control for AP Master, the LED state should co-incide with the FS AP state most of the time).

So I'm purely just wanting to know what I have to connect to this third terminal connector, to give it the power......

Couple of follow up questions then;

Gez - You say connect 2 wires to the 3rd connector on the switch; connect them to what ??!

Steve - Would I need one of these power supplies for every LED ?? .... I'll check them out as I get all my switches and components from Maplins.


Thanks,

[David Rogers]

Hey again,

Here is the power supplies page from Maplin - can anyone point me towards what I'd need as I'm struggling to find it;

http://www.maplin.co.uk/search.aspx?...94&classtype=M

As an alternative question - is there a way of powering this LED by batteries ?


Thanks!

[mpl330]

Hi David,

Someone correct me if I'm wrong but couldn't you put the LED in series with the switch so that when the switch is closed the circuit is made but goes through the LED as you are wanting the LED to light whenever the switch is on???

Cheers
Mike

[mpl330]

Hey again,

Here is the power supplies page from Maplin - can anyone point me towards what I'd need as I'm struggling to find it;

http://www.maplin.co.uk/search.aspx?...94&classtype=M

As an alternative question - is there a way of powering this LED by batteries ?


Thanks!

Hi,

Just use an old PC power supply - the connectors that you plug into hard drives etc are normally 12v and 5v - will have a check for you which colours are which - they will be red 2 black and a yellow...

Mike

[kiek]

Hi,

- I am purely just looking to have the LED light up when the switch is 'made'. (As I will map this switch to the 'z' key and will use only this control for AP Master, the LED state should co-incide with the FS AP state most of the time).

Yes, that is what I was trying to say, you have no guarantee that the led is synchronised with the state in the panel. If the FS window for instance has not got 'focus' (is not the active window), the Z key will not be recognised by FS9/X and then you're out of sync ..

So in general it's not really a good idea to hard wire leds to fixed switch positions, that control information has to come out of the FS9/X ..

My 2 cts...

Note that I also used two KE72 boards 5 years ago when I started with my 'cockpit' and was very happy with it, until I wanted to have leds... Then I moved to the Opencockpits interface boards (IOCards and SIOC), and got rid of my KE72's. If you want to see where that has brought me, have a look at www.nicokaan.nl


Nico

[steveeverson]

hi David- you can use one power supply to power loads of led's- they don't draw much- mpl is right a pc power supply should be fine- i'll look into that too.. i was thinking of adding a timer to my gear lever when i make it so that the lights go to red and then off realistically as i can't get the data from pmdg..
anyway back to the sim- i have a 737 that wont fly itself you know! (actually it can once i get my head around all that vnav lnav stuff.....)
steve