Planning the project

As mentioned in the introduction I would like to add some extra's in the kit. Searching online one can find many 3rd party stuff to bring this kit to the next level. Your knowledge and budget is defining to where you want/can bring it. I have decided for a couple of things.

• I will add 12 red landing lights on the bottom of the fusalage
• I will add two tiny red lights on porside and two tiny green lights on starboard side
• I will change the hydedrive engine lighting for a led strip
• I will add some cockpit console lighting
• I will add a 3rd party kit for the back of the cockpit

All the above lighting will be controlled by a Arduino Nano for two kind of reasons:

1. If I want to create some effects later on this can be easily done with some programming
2. The stock power supply does not have enough outputs available (so we store of for a other future project)

Last but not least I would like to build the Falcon on a diorama in a landed position. Building the kit gives you two possibilites in the flying mode or landed mode, I'll go for the latter.

This all means first of all that some drilling in the model is needed and a electrical circuit needs to be designed to light up all. Most lighting will all be powered by 5 Vdc and a signel led draws around 20 mA which is easy to power by a diogital output pin from a Arduino. But the led strip is a different story and the current drawn by a the led strip is depending on the amount of LED's you're using. But knowing that a digital output of a Arduino can handle max 40 mA and I'm pretty sure I will need more as 2 LED's on a led strip it needs to be controlled by a transistor.

But first I work on the cockpit this is also step one of the instruction manual so lets focus on that first. So Painting Han and Chewbaca do fix the lighting in the cockpit etc. The full circuit I will publish later on to show how it eventually will look like.