Official Lego Lighting
Angle
pieces for holding LED’s and reg Lego
1968 – 12v Train
1974 – First Figures
1978 – First With moveable
1981 – 2nd Gen Trains
1985 – Light and Sound Sets
1986 – Light and Sound Town and Space sets
1957 – First Lights [Pic of my 1957 Brick]
4.5v System
In 1969 Lego introduced a 4.5v system for
Technic motors, trains and lights. 093 superset
9v System
1981 brought a Police based model with
custom 9v powered sound and light components, sets 6430. Later in 1985 sets
6480 and 6450 were released with similar features.
[pics of those)
In XXXX Lego made some products that
[Space Ship]
[Submarine]
12v System
In 1969 the Lego company developed a 12v
lighting and motor system to use with their new train system.
http://brickfetish.com/catalogs/eu/train/eu_1976_1_170.jpg
Picture courtesy of Brickshelf.com
Picture courtesy of Brickshelf.com
Push to Light
The Lego company created a new light, which
has a push button switch. This is in fitting with the Lego Group making it easy
to add interactivity to the models it releases.
The first time I saw this was with the
Christmas Toy Shop released in XXXXX.
[xmas shop]
Unofficial Lego Lighting
Lego shaped LEDs
A new arrival is the LED light brick sold
by Spark Fun electronics [x]
The LEDs on these items has been shaped to
the size of a 1x1 Lego brick complete with a stud on top. This makes them very
easy to make smaller lit items like lampshades, sconces or street lights.
I'm hoping the next generation of them
includes a stud on the side and a recess on the opposite side of it to
facilitate sideward mounting into walls.
They come in 5 colours, and are very bright
powered with the recommended voltage.
[Breadboard picture of the lights, lit and
un lit]
[Lampshade examples]
Littlebits
The Littlebits electronic kits are an
amazing set of components that snap together using magnets. They are very well
designed, and come with an amazing amount of documentation on their web site,
for both children and adults.
Available in a variety of sets, as well as
individually, they have lights, buttons, sensors, internet connectivity and a
programmable brick – most of which we will look at later.
For prototyping there are various LED
components you can connect such as a rope light, RGB LED you can set to any colour to help decide
what to buy for your permanent installation; or indeed just use the LittleBricks
components themselves.
They can be powered by battery or USB,
there is a LittleBit for both.
Wires and Lights – Flexability
The best fun you can have is using LED
lights and programmable controllers. These are very cheap and easy, and you can
plug and play a variety of things into a breadboard. A breadboard is an almost
Lego like item that makes it easy to experiment with you lighting model before
you actually put it in the building.
[Breadboard Picture]
[Nano with Led]
LEDs
By far the cheapest and most flexible solution
to light a model is to use LEDs. You can buy over 100 lights for the price of
one official Lego LED brick, and the wires too.
They plug neatly into the ends of the DuPont
style wires.
[Dupont Pic]
[Clip pic]
[Vertical Bend pic]
[Diagram of LED]
[LED in wires, LED in clip]
One thing to note about LEDs is that they
are not all equal, being that if you buy a bag of 100 hundred from the same
seller and some may be different to each other. Test them in a row.
[Lined up pic]
Circuit Stickers
As a lover of all things to play with that
may educate me in someway, I am a great fan of http://kickstarter.com where
inventors the world over create things and encourage you to back them. One of the
projects I backed was the Circuit Stickets project at https://chibitronics.com
which make it easy to create flat lighting using copper tape of the sort that gardeners
use to keep slugs out of their plant pots.
Its very easy to create things with these,
I’ve used them for cards, place mats and artwork.
[Pooh Placemat pictures]
By laying out copper tape or wire, you run
positive and negative rails through the model and then bridge the two with a
sticker.
You can also get stickers that introduce
effects like fade, heartbeat and even a programmable sticker to create your own
effects. The starter kit comes with an interactive book that teaches you the
core concepts.
[Picure of book, both sides of lightbulb]
[Picture of effects circuit]
Resistors
Resistors are the way to drop voltage to
the level of the LEDs you are lighting up. Different LEDs like different
voltages but also have a tolerance within which they will work and even if you
power them too hard they will still work often, but just for a limited amount
of time.
I have noted that they work overdriven for
longer if you are fluctuating the voltage to them in order to create flickering
or fade effects, and so if that is the case you have less to worry about in
terms of longevity.
The Arduino programmable pins give out 5v
as standard, so a 330ohm resister is needed to drop the voltage down to the 3.3
volts the average LED needs. Some of the LEDs need even less now, and you
should check what you have.
Many breadboard based power supplies are
switchable between 3.3v and 5v which means you can avoid many of the problems
described above.
[Breadboard Power]
The great thing about resistors is that
they work whichever way you install them. The coloured stripes on the resistor
tell you what they do to the voltage applied to the LED.
You can buy small breadbards that can be
easily hidden in your models, and also boards that stack on the Arduino boards
and intereact with the pins directly saving wires.
Transistors
Transistors are a way to light several LEDs
from one control on your device.
[Picture
on bread board]
[Picture on iCircuit]
This is particularly very useful for flood
lighting large models.
A breadboard and power supply.
The simplest solution to lighting a lot of
LEDs is to get a breadboard and a power supply. You can buy all this for under
£5 at the time of writing, though you may have to wait a short while for
postage from the Far East to get the best prices.
In the UK, you can buy them off the shelf
at places such as Maplins, but you will find if you are willing to wait for the
shipping you can buy 100 for the price of 10 in a much larger array of colours
to suit your needs.
Jumper wires and Connecting Wires.
I have found that often the sellers of
sensors and kits throw in a lot of cables with them, if you are exploring
beyond the basic lighting mentioned in the book I recommend looking at this. I
have had lots of freebies in my purchases.
Boxes of cables can be bought too, which
lay flat on breadboards in a variety of sizes and even easily sit under other
components.
[Picture of cable box]
[Picture of cables underneath things]
DuPont Wires
The beauty of the Dupont wires, which come
in various guises and sizes, are they are the perfect solution for those that
don’t like to solder, or who want to easily pull the modular houses apart.
They are produced in strips, with either
male or female connectors – or both - and can be bought very cheaply. They fit
into most of the Microcontrollers boards mentioned in this book, as well as
connecting together and also into LEDs and other components.
[Picture of Leads]
[Picture in LED]
Jumper Cables
The likes of Maplins in the UK, Radio Shack
in the USA or eBay, have boxes of pre-made jumper wires that are a very quick
and neat solution especially for bread boards, and also lay flat on the
breadboards and even under compoants if you need easier access to or want to
avoid using header pins.
[Picture of jumpers o bread board]
[Picture of Jumper Box]
These are often refered to as U-Jumpers,
and boxes of them are very cheap if you look around.
Making Cables
The other way of getting the jumper wires
you need, is to make them.
This can be as simple as grabbing wire from
old electronics and peeling back the ends with a knife, or buying a real of
cable and using a cable stripper. You should aim to get solid core cable not
stranded as its much easier to use with breadboards, unless you solder the
strands together which is unnecessary hassle.
[Picture of Cable Stripper and wire]
Cable strippers can be bought from the
usual sources including eBay, and are a lot quicker to use than a knife as well
as being a lot safer!
You want to aim to strip about 11-13mm
(1/2”) off the end of the cables, in order to fit them snugly into the
breadboard. More is better than less, as long as you ensure wires do not short
each other when sat side by side.
You can experiment with laying wires from
hole to hole on the breadboard to get a feel for the sizes needed, as well as
the size from the breadboard to the Arduino with the aim of having the least
amount of cable for the situation, but not so tight it stops you working on the
breadboard.
You can buy copper wire that is thin enough
to hide in a stack of bricks, so you can literally hide it in the fabric of
your buildings.
Copper Tape
Copper tape can be used as a decorative
feature, as well as providing the supply to your lights..
Gardeners put copper tape around pots to
stop slugs munching on their favorite plants, as it gives them a shock and they
head off to eat something else than your strawberry’s.
The tape comes in various sizes, both in
thickness and length. More importantly it comes with either single sided or
double sided conductivity, which for pots is fine but for your Lego models may
make a difference.
If you find it easier to cut strips and
stick them on your models then the double-sided tape is easier, as the glue is
conductive and you can just lay strips one on top of the other to create a
circuit.
The single sided copper tape needs to be
laid in one continuous run, bending it as you go without cutting the tape. The
single sided tape is considerably cheaper, but the double sided is considerable
easier.
Switches
Breadboard switches provide interactivity
to your project, be that a simple on/off or a change in effect.
USB Power
Not all USB power is equal, and this is
true of all power supplies.
ElectronInks
A great new invention is the ElectronInks
pen, a simple device that writes silver conductive ink.
BrickLoot
A new enterprise at this time is BrickLoot,
they offer a subscription service that primarily delivers boxes of Offical and
Non Official Lego products.
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