Simple ACE 250 LED panel light Mod

[Ricardo_NY1]

Ok, here is what I would call my finished ACE 250 Panel light modification. The only thing I am looking at is perhaps some shrink tubing for that wire....but I'm lazy as heck today to go to Radio Shack and get some. Otherwise, this is a done deal. I detect at night alot and sometimes like to look at my buttons and what's going on in the screen. This will certainly help. Anyone can do it, personally, I know crap about electronics and just went out and researched what I needed to know to get this done. The rest is imagination. First thing is that red is probably the best choice of color, because it will have the least effect on your night vision. You can create this mod with your choice of color and number of LED"s and placement of everything. For mine I used 3 red LED's. Red LED's have a round out voltage of 2 volts and 20 mA's of current will work. With that said, if you hook up an LED directly to anything with more voltage than that, it will meet its end. Therefore, you need to figure out based on what you choose as a battery or battery arrangement, what resistance/resistor you will use. This mod uses 3 red LED's hooked up to a 9 Volt battery. With that said, you need a 180 ohm resistor between your LED's and the current. I purchased Radio Shacks large variety resistor bag and it just so happens that it came with a few 180 Ohms resistors. I also purchased a toggle switch to break up the current. I could go on and explain more, but trust me, a little reading of the links I am going to provide will have you come up with your own plan. This can be applied to more than one project. My parts list were a variety bag of LED's, some resistors, a pack of 9 volt battery holders, and a mini toggle switch. If you can find out exactly what resistance you will need, you can save by just buying the resistors necessary for your project. You will also need a soldering iron and some solder wire, and electrical tape.

Before you begin this project, if you're not familiar with the basics, I suggest you read through these first..........

To get an idea of how your circuit with the 3 LED's should look, read the section on how to wire LED's in SERIES.
http://www.theledlight.com/ledcircuits.html

To figure out the voltage of your LED circuit based on what battery arrangement you want to use, visit this calculator....
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/Bill_Bowden/led.htm

If you need to figure out the resistance of your resistors, this resistor color code page is very useful....
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/Bill_Bowden/resistor.htm

 

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[Ricardo_NY1]

Here's the last two of the photos.

 

[Montana Jim]

That is a fairly sexy modification... and a damned good idea! Well done!!

 

[Ricardo_NY1]

"fairly sexy modification"

Red light district!

 

[cam9457]

Very nice set up Ricardo, I'll do some research and give it a shot

 

[Brett]

Nice job Ricardo! That's a pretty interesting mod. I've done some long night beach hunts with the ACE 250 and a LED head light and it's nice to just turn off the light after a while and get used to the dark. Then just turn the light on when I hit something, but I would end up turning on the light to see what I hit too.

Even those RED LED's can be bright. I'm thinking a little visor over the front of the LED's would still allow them to project down, but not out into your eyes ;-)

One suggestion I have for anyone wanting to get some illumination on your ACE 250... Harbor Freight has these little LED flexi lights... the little one has a pen type clip on it that might clip onto the ACE's visor.
http://www.harborfreight.com/cpi/ctaf/displayitem.taf?Itemnumber=95414
Then you can just point the little LED light at the screen. It's not that bright so it might not have that much impact on nightvision degradation. This would also not void your ACE's warranty ;-)

I have one of these at work. I'll try to clip it on and see how it works. The only downside to the small flexi LED is the watch batteries. The bigger one in the pack takes AA batteries, which would be much better. I'll see if that one can be adapted to the ACE easy as well.

 

[B1u3Dr4g0n1]

Im diggin it...gotta try that