IRT-2X (Drone) Hit Light/LED Mod

This was a very interesting mod, and my most complicated to date. It was surprisingly revealing and makes me once again thankful to Brain "TagFerret" Farley and his team for their forward looking design practices! The mod provides a LED (super bright green wide angle LED's in this case) hit indicator light on both sides of an IRT-2X "Drone"

The basic circuit outline is shown on the left and detailed pictures are shown below. Two LED's are wired in series, directly from the battery' trays +9V take off (without a resistor in this case and a total voltage drop across the two LED's of 8V at 40mA. I am overdriving them, but the duty cycle is very light so I am not concerned about thermal runaway or life time). Enough wire is provided, between the two LED's to ensure the body of the Drone can be opened.

The brown "fire" wire is cut close to the pcb and also at the Thunder Port (I do not use this as all my Thunder Ports have their brown "fire" wires cut already). This is then pulled up to provide enough wire to reach the LED and soldered to the LED lead.

A 1" square perf board is used to mount the transistor (RadioShack #276-1617 NPN-Type Switching Transistor, or #276-2016 2N3904 Transistor)  and resistor, and to make the connections to the brown "ex fire", white "hit" and green "ground" wires. Both white and green wires are cut about mid-point on the board,  and also reconnected to the Thunder Port from the board.

Here is the interesting part ... there is a set of slots to hold a board in the handle! What future goodies is this for? You will need to trim the board a bit, but thank you Tagferret et al.

The LED's are simply inserted into drilled holes, conveniently marked by mold marks, and glued in place with your favorite plastic fixer/cement.

Click on the thumbnails below to see annotated pictures of this mod. Click on the large picture to watch a movie of the finished article in action (if you look closely you will see the dome beacon lights too).