Afterburner Lighting Effects

A few days ago the cheap $20 module that I’m using to making the lighting effect for the afterburner arrived. So this morning I figured I would test out my theory and wire everything up.  The video at the top of the post shows the end result 🙂

After I pulled everything out of the box I quickly came to realize that the only way to configure the modes on the controller was through the included remote control.  Of course the battery for the remote was not included and it looked like it took some really weird sized battery.  So I did some searching around on ebay for other vendors that sold the product and found one that provided the battery and gave its specs.  To my delight the battery that’s supposed to be used with the remote is 12 volts!  That means that I can simply use the car’s 12V power supply to also power the remote.

This is actually a good thing because for sure I’d lose that damn remote and be cursing the day I bought it.  First task was to unscrew the back off the remote and solder on some wires that I could use to connect into the cars power source.

The LED controller provides either a DC plug to power it with 12V or you can use the terminal connections on the other end.  I chose to use the terminal connections because then I can provide both power to the controller as well as power to the remote at the same time.

The controller expects an RGB multi-color LED strip but I’m just going to be running Red LEDs in my afterburner.  To ensure that the Red LEDs light up no matter which channel the controller chooses, I simply took all three of the RGB switching terminals and connected them to my single Red LED strip.   I could likely also experiment with 3 Red LED strips all being controlled on the separate channels, but for right now I only have one to test with.

Once everything was wired up I simply taped the remote to the unit’s casing so that everything is one simple package with the programming buttons attached.  All that was left was to run the audio jack in from the turbine sound effect board and we were ready to test it out 🙂