How to add 3-wire LED Flasher to 2-wire port ?

[TankDriver]

Hello fellow tankers,

Before I fool around & fry a unit, just figured I'd throw this one out to the masses & see if anyone has done this before: does anyone have any experience with hooking up a Taigen/Torro/Imex "High Intensity Flasher", which has 3 wires, to a tank board such as that of a Hooben, which has a 2-wire LED port? I realize that the 3 wires on the LED unit are Battery (positive), Battery (negative), and a trigger wire, but I'm not sure how a single wire can 'trigger' the unit to flash anyway, unless it's using the battery negative as a common ground (doesn't a 'trigger' need 2 wires, to 'close' an electric circuit on demand?), so am not sure how to adapt this single trigger lead to the 2-lead port on the board. I can easily make a separate adapter to allow the LED unit to draw constant power from the battery plus & minus to keep its capacitor charged up & ready to discharge... am just not sure what to do with that 3rd wire... Thanks for any help you can provide!

[tankme]

I've used a lot of the High Intensity Flashers on my tanks connected to Clark boards or Open Panzer TCBs which both have a 3-wire connection. I actually smoked one of the boards on one of the flasher units hooking it up wrong once to a Clark board. Funny part was I desoldered the actual LED portion and connected it to a Heng Long board using just the two wires. I installed it in my Kranvagn along with the IR LED. Being long and thin they both fit in the 130mm barrel. I know that is a waste of money, but the board for the high intensity LED was already toast. All the board does is store up a larger charge in the capacitors and then it discharges the LEDs with a higher intensity. It is definitely brighter than a standard LED, but I've also used 5mm flat top LEDs hooked to a Heng Long board. They end up being darn bright. Once my supply of the High Intensity LEDs is done, I probably will just revert to regular 5mm flat top LEDs for all future builds.

Bottom line, you would probably need some kind of a relay to do it like they do with the Heng Long boards to use the High Intensity Flasher. I had one hooked up using a relay in my T72, but it wasn't very reliable and eventually stopped working so I reverted back to a standard LED. This is the thread on connecting it to a Haya 6.3 which is the same as a Heng Long 6.1. The old High Intensity units were Xenon bulbs so don't be concerned about that. They work the same as the newer LED version.

viewtopic.php?t=30525

[TankDriver]

Thanks for the link... I'll study it & see how it might be used... don't think I actually need a relay, since the Hooben board already has a dedicated output for the cannon flash, unlike the Heng Long boards which keep their barrels clear of LEDs for Airsoft usage.

[tankme]

Thanks for the link... I'll study it & see how it might be used... don't think I actually need a relay, since the Hooben board already has a dedicated output for the cannon flash, unlike the Heng Long boards which keep their barrels clear of LEDs for Airsoft usage.

Heng Longs and Clarks have a regular cannon LED port. It's LED1 on the Heng Long - "Launch flashing light". That the port I plug my cannon LED into for all my Heng Long based tanks. It flashes when the gun fires. It's port J3 on the Clark for a normal cannon LED. The problem is the trigger wire on the High Intensity Flasher. If you don't "trigger" it, the LED won't flash. I've looked at my Hooben MFU manual and I don't see how you would do it as it doesn't have a way to trigger the light. The Taigen units and even the HL units have a trigger line built in for the airsoft trigger. My Hooben MFU doesn't have an airsoft function on it.

Good luck.

[TankDriver]

A-ha! I was wondering what "launch flashing light" meant on the Heng Long diagrams... good to know it's there on my HL tanks if needed. For now I'll keep their barrels clear since everything else I own is IR, but one day maybe a conversion is in order. I have successfully installed many of these LED flashers on Taigen & Clark boards ('plug & play' with their 5-pin sockets). I'm wondering if the LED flasher's trigger line just needs a +5V voltage burst that could be fed from the positive connection of the 2-pin LED terminal (#20 on this Hooben diagram). Assuming the constant negative feed from the battery to the flasher will serve as a 'common' negative for the trigger as well, this should work... I'll do some snooping with my multimeter before I burn up anything hopefully

[TankDriver]

OK, so I've done some testing, and didn't even fry a single flash unit! As long as you feed 5V power to it from the board (either from an open terminal or split off from one for the fan, for example) then the 'trigger' signal is merely a connection to the positive lead of the same power source. Must have a common ground to work, so you can't pull power from a spare battery... it has to be the same one providing the + and - leads to the flash unit. So, a 3-wire high-intensity LED unit CAN be added to your 2-wire tank! (Not sure if you can use 7.2V instead of 5V tho)