Chris Stauffer at myITForum.com

Adding Red LED’s to my Telescope

I added Red LED’s to the legs of my telescope so that could see where I put it on a dark (no moon night). This was done so that I wouldn’t have to always have a flashlight in hand and because I was bored and needed a project and the wife let me spend the money cause it only cost about 20 bucks 

 
So here is what I did.

You will need the following and all can be purchased from your local radio shack.

3 LED’s at 1.7 volts (max 2.4 volts) = 5.1 volts max 7.2

connected to a 4AA battery pack 6 volts works nice.

 
3 LED Holder

3 Red LED (can use ones with less light output but I wanted these  )

You will need to remove the legs from your tripod. If they are aluminum like mine then they should be hollow. If they are wood well then you will have to figure out how to add the lights. Once the legs are removed you will need to drill a hole near the base of the legs, large enough to hold the metal LED holders. Then drill a hole about 3-4 inches from the top of the legs.

            You will need to solder the LED  to the wire that you are going to use. I had phone cord (white with 4 wires) laying around from my last project so I used this and just twisted 2 wires together this gave me a positive and negative line. Make sure that you solder all of the LED s to the wire the same way. One leg is longer then the other on the LED so you can tell what is negative and what is positive. I used shrink tube to make it look clean. Give yourself about 3 times the length of the legs in wire so you can fully extend the legs and still reach where you put your battery box.

            Once you have all of the LED’s wired run the wires though the holes that you drilled so that the LED s are at the base of each leg. Once you get the wire to the top of the leg run it back out of the hole you drilled at the top of the legs. Now stuff half of the extra wire into the legs so that you can move the legs up and down freely.

            Reattach the legs. Run the wire however you need to so that it all meets at one leg. I had a peace of metal conduit left from yet another project so I zip tied it to one of the legs and ran all of my wires down though it. Once at the bottom of the outermost leg I finished the wiring.

            The wiring is real simple. Just connect the positive of the battery pack to the positive of the first led. Then connect the negative of the first LED to the positive of the second led. Then the negative of the second LED to the positive of the third LED. Lastly connect the negative of the third led to the negative of the battery pack. Real simple. I recommend twisting everything together and testing that it all works before making anything permanent. Once you know that all of your LED’s work then you can solder and shrink tube everything. Lastly used zip ties to hold everything to the leg and make it look neat.

Here are some picks of the finished product. See Attachment.

Have Fun