Blade Nano QX - LED MOD

These Nano QX are great, especially for flying indoors.
One does not have to worry too much about getting nasty scratches into furniture.
They are ultra light weight and very stable. Just perfect. Wait, no, its getting dark.

Since a love flying at night through the dark yard or over the neighbouring fields it did not take long for me to decide to add some LEDs to my Nano QXs so I could fly through my flat in the dark.
If you want to try it just looks awesome and give enough light to see where you're going and what orientation the quad has.

For orientation I added one SMD LED to each arm. Yellow/green to the front and red ones to the back. When the LEDs have the same color as the props, the props shine nicely.

To see where you are going i added some headlights. I used two 3mm white standard LEDs.

The whole setup took about 3 to 4 hours since it is a lot (16) of wires to solder.

To fit the orientation LEDs I drilled a small hole (1mm dia.) right in front of the motor mounts. Take a 1206 or 0603 SMD LED and solder a piece of enameled copper wire to each side. Push the wire through the hole and fix the LED with a small spot of glue.

Cut one of the wires at the middle of the quads arm and solder a resistor to it. About 50 to 100 Ohm will do, depending on how bright you want it to be. 

To add some headlights I bent the two LEDs anodes to meet in the center and left the cathodes on the outside straight. I soldered regular 100 Ohm resistors to the straight contacts and pushed them through in a 45 degree angle from the top right between the controller board and the chassis. There should be some room made by the piece of sticky tape that is used for dampening.
Bend the ends carefully so they keep the LEDs in place and make sure you do not short anything.

On the back of the controller board there are two solder points: the battery connector. You can solder two pinheads there so you can turn of the lights be removing a jumper plug.
Solder one end of the pinheads to the power supply pin and the six copper wires from your LEDs to the other. The other six wires you can either solder directly to the other power supply point or split them up by soldering the arm LEDs to the headlight LEDs. There is plenty of space. so you only have to connect the two headlights to the power supply pin.

When done push the wires in to the cavity of the arms and fix them with a small piece of black insulating tape.

The power consumption of the LEDs takes like 5% of the flight time. Which I think OK.

The added weight is very low and so negligible. Just stick to small and light parts and dont use to thick wires.