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Focusing LED light through fiber optics...
RayB:
Did you create a lens on the tip of the optic fibre? Use a heat source... lighter will do. Very gently and briefly heat the end until it melts and forms a sort of "lens". It helps it take in more light.
Franco B:
I didn't use a lighter but I did sand the fibres upto 1500 grit and then polished them. I did try the lighting before and after sanding/polishing and it did make it much brighter but still no where near as bright as it needs to be.
richms:
Could you just use some acrylic rod and epoxy that to the LED and have the LED itself at the bottom of the shaft and the acrlic taking the light up thru the joystick shaft?
Franco B:
Yeah that would have been possible but it would only have taken a couple of twists of the joystick to rip the wiring out.
I spoke to Haruman and found out he was using JLFs so I decided to have a go at modding them. In an ideal world, to get the best lighting we needed to get a 5mm RGB LED inside the end of the shaft/ball top. This has been impossible before because you can only drill a ~3.2mm bore because of the root diameter of the M6 thread.
The solution in the end was pretty easy. If you increase the thread size on the shaft you can also increase the size of the bore. An M8 thread has a root diameter of 6.47mm so that would allow us to drill a ~5.2mm bore which then allowed us to fit a 5mm LED (with the shoulder removed) inside the shaft.
Obviously the bubble tops have an M6 thread but luckily there is plenty of material in the inserted nut so I just opened the thread out to M8 to match the shafts.
As there was now a 5.2mm bore in the shaft it meant that we could no longer use the e-clip to keep the spring in compression as the e-clip groove diameter is 5mm. There is now only a 1mm wall thickness so a larger e-clip was out of the question. I decided to use some kind of sleeve and grub screws in place of the e-clip and I thought if I was making some kind of sleeve I may as well increase the length of it and add a 4 pole jack/socket for tangle free RGB lighting.
Anyway, here she is:
Obviously the adapter adds to the required CP depth but this wasn't as issue for Haruman or myself. I had previously modded a JLF and got the 4 pole socket flush with the end of the stock stick by redesigning pretty much all of the shaft components but this was not possible in this case as we needed RGB.
Even with the Nylon adapter, socket and screws, the new shaft assembly is 2 grams lighter than the solid stock one (56g). Once the LED etc is installed (I need to order some from GGG) I imagine it should weigh even closer to the stock one.
Cornchip:
I have to ask myself why this is something new. I posted this mod in your 'Franco's Custom Sticks - Carbon Fiber Fun' thread. Your welcome. ::)
http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=88571.0
Cornchip.
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