OK, let’s look at that revolving light which is sitting at the top of the Spinner. Decades ago, I had no clue as to what everyone else was saying except that the roof light needs to be lit and the complain about Fujimi that the part was not molded in clear plastic. It was not until I was watching the scene below and also, the earlier scene where both Deckard and Gaff left after going through Leon’s Apartment.
The roof light was actually a revolving light, and the closest colour I could see was warm white. Not only that, the wall for that light was semi-transparent which means, the Fujimi part is good enough (but the LEDs would have to be brighter than usual I guess)
The 5-LED fade or the 9-LED smooth slide?
Years ago, when I was developing the lighting for the lights, I designed this revolving lights to only use 5 LEDs. Once of the reason was that the board size was limited to about 8mm or so, with a ceiling height of 4.5mm. Physically, it was possible to fit 10 0805 SMD LEDs in there. The main problem was in the linking of the LEDs. In the beginning, I keep thinking that the revolving light had two light dots due to the ‘timing’ where when one light disappears, and reappear, the timing was too fast for a single light dot. You can see this during the scene where Deckard and Gaff was at Leon’s Yukon Apartment, right after we see Gaff finishing his matchstick figure and putting it on the table So, this means, I had to double the 5 initial LEDs. The problem arise when each LED needs to be connected to its equivalent across the board which has a hole in the middle.
How about WS2812B?
The WS2812B LEDs are a new breed of LEDs. They come with a small controller chip which controls the Red, Green and Blue LEDs giving you a choice of 256 brightness and 16777216 color display. And they are connected serially, with no signal degradation. And they great as LED strings, outdoor displays and more importantly, lightsabres.
Despite the 2mm size, fitting them onto the board is still a challenge. Let’s look at their fitting first.
Now, the bad news. The current consumption for a 1 meter strip can go up from 1.8 Amps to about 8.64 Amps, depending on the number of LEDs. I am not worried about that since in most of my projects, I do not need that much (for the time being) LEDs. What I am more concerned is the microprocessor system itself. The most promising microcontroller would be the ATtiny85 and yes, I would have to learn about Arduinos.
But in the end…
I still want to use the 5 0805 SMD LED idea first. Just jumping into the WS2818B can be pretty expensive right now. You’d need the hardware such as the Chip and the programmer. Then you’d need to get the software and so on. Plus, this would also mean another re-design of the Main Board. So, yeah, let’s just go with the 5 LEDs first.
