Warlord Titan Head LED lighting

My other titans have LED lighting in the cockpit, and I can’t have my biggest, baddest titan without!

Goals:

• Lighting in the warlord Titan, to compliment (but not match) my reaver and two warhounds
• Slightly less bright LEDs that the others… so I can photograph the warlord with the LEDs on w/o blowing out the exposure on the pictures.
• Replaceable LEDs in case they fail or I want to change the brightness/color.
• Removable battery/switch, such that when the battery is not installed it doesn’t add a huge clumsy artifact to the model
• Doesn’t obstruct anything in the cockpit, both Moderati and the Princeps still need to fit.
• Allows the head to be detached from the main body (magnetized) so I can purchase additional heads/cockpits and swap them out.

You can see how I achieved those goals below. I wired through the main torso with 24 gauge wire I had on hand… it’s pretty heavy wire for this appliucation, and if I were to special order wire I’d probably go with 26 or even 28 gauge wire. It would have been a bit more fragile but easier to route in the cockpit.

I crimped the connectors using the ‘PA-09’ crimping tool, which is a must for making your own connectors with smaller gauge wire. I happen to have all this gear because two of my other hobbies (drones and Arduino/physical computing/IoT)

Drilling the holes for the nylon LED holders was a bit dodgy as it just feels wrong drilling out detail on a model like this. Because we can buy the heads separately it’s much less nerve racking, as a mistake mean you ruin/degrade a $88 head instead of a $1800 complete titan. Still sketchy, but thank you ForgeWorld for selling the heads separately!

Here is a screen capture of the digikey order for the JST connectors. I bought a (lot) extra and JST connectors are just really handy to have on hand.

The black LED holders are digikey part number 67-1330-ND, and are ‘holder LED panel 3mm black nylon’ from ‘lumex opto/components inc’

The LEDs I used are digikey part number 516-2328-ND, AND ARE ‘LED 3MM Alingap Hi Perf Amber’ from ‘Avago Technologies US Inc)

I don’t have the part number of the resistors or battery pack. Adafruit has a nice iphone app ‘circuit playground’ that lets you choose the right resistors based on the ‘forward & supply voltage and forward current. I think the battery pack came from SparkFun. It’s 2xAA, which is pretty big, so I might switch over to a small LiPo battery or a 2xAAA solution in the future. The whole reason I connected everything up with the JST connectors is so I can swap stuff out later. I might build something warhammer-ish with existing bitz around a lipo pack and paint it up so it looks more integrated in the future.

So far I’m happy with it. One optimization would be to miniaturize the connectors and the battery solution to make them less obvious on the finished model. I went with an external battery pack because there is no accessible ‘inside’ on the warlord like the warhound/reaver, .

The Emperor Protects! Praise the Omnissiah!