Let there be light!

With all my new electrical supplies and tools, and the fact that I am home for at least 72 hours, I wanted to jump into something easy just to start building some knowledge and skills.  I decided working on the switches would be the best place to start... however after about 4 hours of messing with the switches I was stuck to a point that I decided to post on VAF about. Lesson learned- If you want to use a Vertical Power VPX system and also want a mix of dependent and independent lighting, then you need a dual power, single throw (DPST) switch. So had to order some of these and decided to move onto something else.

Back in May I did a quick post about my overhead lighting layout.  These two panel pieces had been sitting in a box so I figured why not get this all wired up instead.  Given that it's 105° Fahrenheit out I was also able to make this an inside activity for the most part.  It took a few hours but when I was done I had practiced some soldering, some heat shrinking, some molex pins and connectors and some wire routing.

With the panels completed I fished my harness down the center brace, connected some ziptie bases to hold the cables and then connected and screwed in the panels.  I really like how it turned out and I think this set up will work out well.

I've been using a 9 volt battery to test out light function.  At one point I was concerned because it looked like I had these wired in series because as I would turn additional lights on they would start to dim.  Being a bit paranoid I tested on the planes actual battery and the lights are extremely bright and no degradation as I turn them all on.  I'm actually going to hook these up to a rheostat as well so I can control the brightness, don't particularly like night flying and pretending on I'm a WW2 submarine.

Just for some additional pictures I went ahead and connected 9 volt to take some additional pictures.  All these lights are independent for the most part.  I can have a single red or both on, or the two white lights, or the white lights and a red light, or all the lights on.  Here's what both Reds look like.

Here's what the two white lights look like. This is actually pretty dim, I think my 9 volt battery might be more like a 7 volt battery at this point.  The green push button also looks extremely bright, which it is, however once it's on ships power and I have the rheostat the red and white lights are about 10x brighter and the green light stays about the same.  So I will be able to turn the intensity down.