I wanted to do this long time ago but only had time to do it recently. I want to see the blade when flying in the dark. I've thought about running power through the swashplate, which is very possible: one wire to the main shaft. Another wire is fed through the swashplate: i.e the the batt goes to the outer ring of the swashplate, the led goes to the inner ring of the swashplate. Since the ball bearing is metal it should carry the current for the led. This sounds good, but when I was about to do it, I found it's hard to solder any wire to the alum. swashplate. Besides that, the resistant of the two rings of the swashplate is not good. I was afraid it could cause glitches. So I went with another route: putting the battery on top of the head.



The battery is a tiny 20mAh Kokam Li-Po battery. It fits in a piece of carbon fiber tube (cutting from old shogun's tail boom). That tube is then glued to a servo horn. The servo horn is screwed to the top of the align Trex head.

The led is mounted this way (after several round of changing the way to attach it)


It's impossible to yank out the led if mounting this way (I had the led almost flew off before I came to this way) (The blade is dirty because it was an old set of blades, and I just did a pack hovering outside.)

The leds do not cause any extra vibration that I could see.

Spin up to take the picture:




Now with my Li-Po strobes, I think I pretty much can fly in the dark.

I've demo'ed night flying low altitude circle in the dark a few times and my relatives & colleagues thought it was like a UFO.

It's better to use very thin wires to power the led at the tip of the blade. The thicker wires cause lots of drag and the motor will become really hot. I use 30 gauge copper wire and it's significantly cooler than the Kynar wires. I've not had a smaller wire for it yet. I guess if we run the wires then cover the blade again with another layer of heat shrink layer that would be better.

Shorter blade & thinner wire really help.

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