Hey guys,

Just wanted to share one of my first mods as I'm pretty happy with how it turned out: programmable LED lighting for a shadow caster (been flying a lot of them lately)!

I'll omit the description here and instead refer you here for the full description and album (pictures and video): https://photos.app.goo.gl/cWftN5Jl0hcVfzeu2

I wanted to post back here as I've lurked a lot on folks doing neat modifications here and being new to all of this I never would have been able to accomplish this without lots of great video, pictures, WIP guides and descriptions from people here and elsewhere, so just wanted to say a collective thanks!

In the same spirit if there's anything I can answer for folks here about how I did my mod, I'd be more than happy to contribute back. Enjoy!

Now I just need to learn to paint...

Very nice. I especially like sneaking in the usb port.

To increase battery life, what you could do is add in a vibration sensor and tie it to one of the interrupt pins. This would let you put the engine lights into a dim mode (via pwm) and go to full brightness for X seconds after it detects motion, and even put the duino into low power mode after X minutes of no motion.

All it needs now is a sweet paintjob!

8 hours ago, treybert said:

To increase battery life, what you could do is add in a vibration sensor and tie it to one of the interrupt pins. This would let you put the engine lights into a dim mode (via pwm) and go to full brightness for X seconds after it detects motion, and even put the duino into low power mode after X minutes of no motion.

I've been fooling around with options for my next ship (YT-1300) on this front. The vibration sensor is an interesting idea for a neat engine effect, although I've found I like the lights to be bright all the time, as most of the game stores I play at are quite brightly lit. The battery life during active play is actually pretty good - it can usually get through a full day tournament and if need be it's easy enough to charge up off a mobile battery cell during downtime. Note that the engine lights are not actually connected to PWM, as I only effectively have ~3 PWM pins to play with on the Qduino, but it's easy enough to do "software" PWM in this case as all the chip is doing is controlling the lights so there's plenty of cycles to spare.

That said I definitely want a better solution for on/off on the next ship. I've been fooling with the low power modes on the Arduino as you note, and while you can get it down to ~1mA on the Qduino, that's still somewhat more draw than I'd want to leave it doing "all the time", as that still drains the battery too quickly in storage. Instead I've been experimenting with wiring up a reed switch either between the battery and the Qduino or by rewiring the on/off switch on the Qduino itself (bit tricky but I think doable) and then triggering them with a magnet on a removable/movable part on the ship. This seems pretty promising, especially if I rewire the actual switch so that the battery can still charge even when the board is off. More experimentation needed though.

Thanks for the ideas!

7 hours ago, Celestial Lizards said:

All it needs now is a sweet paintjob!

Absolutely! I'm a noob at painting though so while I've just started dipping my feet in with smaller ships it'll be a while before I feel confident enough to try my hand at a modded one I'm actually less nervous about ripping a ship apart and wiring it up than painting it, so I'm going to need more experience on the latter front first. But I agree it does need a custom paint job at some point.

If you go the reed switch route, I'd wire it on the battery. I'm not sure how much you would gain to be able to charge it while its off since the current draw on the whole system is around 66ma, and usb is at 500ma.

Looking at the qduino's spec, you should have 7 pwm pins. 13/11/5/3/9/6

https://cdn.sparkfun.com/datasheets/Dev/Arduino/Boards/QduinoMiniV1.pdf

12 hours ago, treybert said:

If you go the reed switch route, I'd wire it on the battery. I'm not sure how much you would gain to be able to charge it while its off since the current draw on the whole system is around 66ma, and usb is at 500ma.

Yeah the point was more to just a bit more intuitive, not because of charge rate. It indeed will charge at 100mA (default rate) regardless of if the thing is on or off. But I may end up just wiring it to the battery for simplicity so I don't have to try and solder between some pretty cramped SMD components

Quote

Looking at the qduino's spec, you should have 7 pwm pins. 13/11/5/3/9/6

Yup that's what I thought initially, but: 10/11/13 are used for the onboard RGB led and 3 is also the SCL pin, and the Qduino uses I2C to communicate with the fuel gauge (battery level) chip, so you only end up with 3 in the end unfortunately.

Like I said it's not a big deal here because you can (and I do) do "software" PWM, but slightly unfortunate.