It’s now tomorrow morning, and I’ve found the thing I wanted to post:
Page 1 of 2 - Singing and dancing Land Raider! - posted in + WORKS IN PROGRESS +: As some of you may remember, a long, long time ago I started converting a standard Land Raider into a Prometheus. I always had the intention that it would become a light-and-sound show as well — so here's a short...
www.bolterandchainsword.com
That’s a thread I posted in 2008 on a Warhammer 40,000 forum about a
Land Raider I had equipped with a light-and-sound show: an MP3 player with speakers, plus blinking and continually on LEDs, the former lighting up the exterior through fibre-optics. (Note that I had to disable my adblocker to get that site to load images.)
Check the thread for a thorough description, but the basics of it are that I bought some blinking LEDs and soldered them together with some resistors (again, see the thread for how to calculate what you need) into this circuit:
You can ignore the bit on the left with the MP3 player and amplifier, of course. It all looks like this in the flesh:
For the fibre-optics themselves, I used a cheap
TOSLINK cable I bought at an electrics store:
On the left is the normal plug that’s at both ends of the cable, on the right is a piece I cut off and stripped. Initially I wanted to leave the black covering on it, but decided to remove it because it made the cable much thicker and less flexible. Inside the model, I put everything together like this:
I drilled holes into the sides of bits of plastic tube and glued them into the model, then inserted the fibre-optics. The LEDs sit inside the pieces of tube:
Here’s the model with the power off and on:
The fibre-optics stick out from the side of the model so that I could paint the vehicle without having to mask 1 mm diameter lights: I just painted right over them and when I was done, trimmed the fibre-optics back to sit flush with the sides of the model.