Build Log: Compact RC Lighting System for Night Flying and Navigation.
I started this project to add reliable navigation lights and flexible addressable strips to a 2.2 metre model glider for safe evening flying, and this log records the step-by-step decisions and measurements I made during the build.
First I sketched the layout and chose parts that balance brightness and weight, aiming for clear port and starboard nav lights plus a few metres of addressable strip for spanwise accent lighting, and I decided early on to keep the lighting system on a separate power rail to simplify power budgeting and troubleshooting.
- Two high-efficiency 3mm LED nav lights (red and green) with 330 ohm resistors.
- One fully addressable WS2812B strip, 60 LEDs per metre, cut to 20 LEDs in total.
- Small logic-level controller (5V output capable) and a 5V 3A UBEC for strip power.
- Inline 5A fuse, common ground wiring harness and JST-SR connectors for quick removal.
Power budgeting came next and that decision shaped the rest of the build, because addressable strips can draw a lot of current at full white so I calculated worst-case draw as 60mA per LED for the WS2812Bs, giving 20 LEDs × 60mA = 1.2A for the strip, nav LEDs at about 20mA each add 40mA, and budget for controller and margin makes roughly 1.5A continuous with bursts possible, so I chose a 3S LiPo powering a 5V 3A UBEC and added a small capacitor across the UBEC output to smooth transients.
Wiring and nav light placement are critical for visibility and easy maintenance, so I routed the nav lights to the wingtips with thin PTFE sleeved wire and retained the original servo tubes for structural protection, I used current-limiting resistors on the fixed nav LEDs and tied their grounds to the common ground of the UBEC, and I installed a small inline switch and a 5A micro fuse in the positive feed so the lights can be disabled independently of the main receiver power.
For the addressable strip I mounted it on the underside of the wing with aluminium tape for heat dissipation and used a short, well-shielded data lead from the controller to the first pixel, and I included a logic-level shifter because the controller runs at 3.3V logic while the strip expects a 5V data signal, which improved reliability and prevented data corruption when powering the strip from the UBEC on the bench or in flight.
Testing and tuning were done in three stages to protect the electronics and to find the right brightness for night flying, starting with bench tests where I limited strip brightness to 20 per cent to confirm draw and patterns, then full-system ground tests to verify voltage drops and the behaviour of the nav LEDs with the receiver bound, and finally short tethered night-check flights where I gradually increased brightness while confirming that the servos and receiver did not suffer interference; full wiring diagrams and my code snippets are documented on my site at WatDaFeck.
