I2 trim piece LEDs

[ryan_walters]

I know it's been done before, but I thought I'd post how I put LED's in the LSF's bottom trim piece.

I don't have pictures of the batteries, but I simply took 4 AA NiMh that I had lying around here, carefully (quickly) soldered them in series (end to end) with about 1/2" between. Then put them into some heavy duty heatshrink to protect them. With the space between the batteries, they can still curve to the shape of the LSF, and the heatshrink also stops the wires from fatigue. I found they still moved around inside the LSF, so I wrapped some foam around the heatshrink to give them a little more size.

For a switch I double sided foam taped a simple toggle switch also covered in heatshrink near the top of the LSF.

Both the batteries and the switch wires exit at the bottom. Here's a picture of that:

Click for fullsize:


The connector going through the hole to the outside will be for charging, while the other connector will hookup to the LED's. And yes, that is Cat5 pairs I used (current is quite low). The orange pair comes directly off of the battery. The blue pair is the SPST switch.

And here's the LED wiring:

Click for fullsize:


The leds themselves are simply hot-glued in. Each resistor for the leds is soldered onto the 'negative' side of the led; the bare wire in the photo is actually one side of the resistor. The 'positive' sides are connected using red, or yellow (because I ran out of spare red) wire. Then a wire from each 'side' goes to the connector.

Then the trim piece gets set back into the LSF with the connector attached:

Click for fullsize:


The the whole LSF gets mounted back onto the segway. Batteries charged up. And it's now ready to test.

Here's two pictures of the final result: (yes I've insulated my batteries for winter)

Click for fullsize:


Click for fullsize:


I think it'll show up quite well at night, even with the 'headlight' on.

The whole thing draws around 250ma. With my 2300 mah batteries, I should easily get 8 hours.