If you are looking for a clean LED solution for your quadcopter, check out these motor wire LED boards. These are basically LED’s that are built on top of race wires, and the brightness changes with throttle level.
Where to Buy?
These LED’s are made by CLRacing, the company that makes the CLRacing F7 FC. They have the same width as race wires and designed to be mounted on the arms of quadcopter frames.
- Short (25mm): Banggood: http://bit.ly/2v6HrQL
- Medium (35mm): Banggood: http://bit.ly/2IGnsjE
- Long (40mm): Amazon: https://amzn.to/2Gq73P1
What’s special about these motor wires LED boards?
There is no configuration, they are plug and play.
The LED’s are powered by motor wires. When the quad is disarmed, the LED’s are off, as there is no power to the motors. As soon the the motors start spinning, they light up. And the faster the motors spin, the brighter the LED gets.
They can replace race wires – a popular silicone wires alternative for 4in1 ESC’s. See my review of race wires if you don’t know what they are.
The cool things about these motor wire powered LED boards are that you don’t need any additional voltage regulators, and they are extremely flexible when it comes to wiring.
You can solder them either in series or in parallel with the motor. You can even connect multiple of them in parallel.
Optionally, you can install one on the top and another on the bottom of the arm like this.
Any Impact to Performance?
You might wonder if the LED affect the performance of the quadcopter, since it’s taking power off the motor. The short answer is no, there is no noticeably difference with or without these motor wire LED’s. I guess that’s because how little power they take.
Some are worried about the durability of 4in1 ESC by adding LED’s to them. But each of these boards draw only about 50mA of current at most, that’s 0.1% of the rated current rating of an ESC.
7 comments
Interesting how large current they can pass through? Are they are capable to support single motor power draw about 40-50A in peak? Fried track in these would be not nice.
I have my LEDs wired up as described but when I put power to the quad on one of my boards only 3 of the leds light up yet the other 3 boards are fine. Funny thing is when I connect to betaflught ri test the motors all 6 leds light up when it receives power. What am I doing wrong?
I wonder, has anyone tested these to see whether they negatively affect the back-EMF that the ESC is relying on?
What about flight time?
I have mamba led board, connected in series with the motors, everything works well but the LEDs do not light, do I have to do any configuration? could you help me with that problem? Thank you
lol salty
Thanks for sharing this information with us. This information is really interesting and valuable for me. So keep sharing this types of articles with us.