My Fully Automatic Brake/Tail/Reverse Lights...

[NFA Fabrication]

I've been playing with electronics as a hobby for a while now, and am always looking for a purpose for some of my projects so I have something usable when done after trying to figure out how certain circuits work.

Lately I have been pulling apart old stripped servos and finding ways to use the circuit board for switching things on/off based on signal input. For my SCX10, I developed this system that runs 4 LEDs (2 red, 2 white) to act as parking/brake and reverse lights. For the parking lights, I use the same high intensity red LEDs as the brake lights, but in park light mode, they are run at a lower duty cycle at a high frequency to simulate being dim. The red LEDs are at full power when the throttle trigger is at neutral (When the drag brake is on), to show brake lights. And the reverse lights simply come on when the truck is reversed. I also have 2 high powered 13 LED light bars and rock lights that can be turned on from my controller manually (Futaba 4PLS).

There are probably easier ways to do this than the way I did it, but I was researching how to make specific circuits work, and integrated what I was already working on into my project.

YOUTUBE LINK: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZRolYml-q0

[Kingmeow]

Watched the YouTube video...awwesome!

Care to provide more details or even the circuit diagrram?

[NFA Fabrication]

Originally Posted by Kingmeow

Watched the YouTube video...awwesome!

Care to provide more details or even the circuit diagrram?

Thank! And as far as a diagram, I thought about it, but it would take forever to make a usable diagram.

[TekmoCrawl]

Creative work!

[doublej]

I would love to see how you wired this. Shouldn't be to hard to take a photo of the pieces and explain what connects to what.
HeyOK makes some of the eat electrical parts out there but like you - It's fun to build stuff.

[bigdogs21ford]

Originally Posted by NFA Fabrication

Thank! And as far as a diagram, I thought about it, but it would take forever to make a usable diagram.

Well if you do, I'm sure many of us would appreciate it.
That is some smart electrical engineering right there. Very cool.

[NFA Fabrication]

The only real issue was that this was a project to figure out how certain electronic circuits work, and was utilized as a light controller afterwards. And because of that, ended up being about 4x more complicated that it would have been had I had designed it from the beginning with this purpose in mind.

There is a chance that I will do a redesign with this light controller as the intended result. If I do that, I will more than likely make a diagram for that. For example, one part of this project involves 2 completely separate electrical circuits talking to each other without electrical connection (Think fiber-optics). There is no logical reason to do this for this project outside of my experimenting, so my current method is not even close to practical for the average install.

I have also made a module that turns on the headlights automatically based on a light sensor so I can free up a controller channel, it works on the bench, but have yet to install it. All of these projects are 100% Solid State with no moving parts/mechanical switches involved.