Duratrax ICE Back Light Modification March 11, 2005
Posted by Shannon in : R/C Projects , trackbackDisclaimer: This article is provided for information purposes only. Rochester R/C accepts no responsibility for any damages incurred from following the below “How To” guide. By taking apart your Duratrax Ice Charger you are VOIDING your warranty. Use at your own risk.
HOW TO Add back lighting to the Duratrax Ice DC Charger.
First. The Disclaimer: Don’t try this at home. I’m a professional working in controlled environment. I know what I’m doing. I never make mistakes, should I do some I always hide the witnesses bodies. This document shows how I added back light to MY Duratrax Ice Charger. Its not meant as a guide to follow. Should you decide to do something similar to your own charger you do it on your own and carry full responsibility yourself for your actions. Doing this modification will void your warranty. It is likely to destroy the charger and might be dangerous to your health. It will make your grow older by a full year in the next 365 days, make your hair fall off and make teenagers call you The Old Man and be embarrassed to be seen in your company. The last one may have already happened, depending on your age and family situation.
Second. This is copyrighted material. Use of this material in any altered form is forbidden. You are free to make as many electronic or paper copies as you like in unaltered form. No modifications to the material are allowed and no use of any part of it in any other publication.
Step 1:
Now, where to begin? Oh yeah, at the disassembly. Oh, the joy of taking stuff apart. For a while I thought I heard the voice of Mr. 5 whining. No disassemble (Phew that dates me, far, far, far back). So it must have been something else I heard. Disassembling is the easy part. Putting things back together is bit harder, especially if you’ve modified them, were in a hurry and didn’t think things through before beginning.
Disassembly. There are 8 screws that need to be removed, 4 at each side. The fan is held on with extra long ones. After removing the side plates (leaving them hanging by the wires) the next step is removing the head of the rotating button. It is pressed on the switch and is pretty hard to pry off. There is great chance that the switch itself may be damaged if too much force is used in prying it apart. Instead using side cutters, carelessly grab the shaft right next to the button, then wiggling the cutters pushes the head off, 1 millimeter at a time. Look at the picture below; it says a thousand words, like so many pictures do.
Next is removing the faceplate. There are small knobs holding it in place, bending them carefully while using great force on the faceplate itself lets the faceplate fall off, hanging on the flat cable that is removed from the PCB (Printed Circuit Board) by lifting the top of the white plug. Now that the front is off its time for the next step.
Step 2:
Irreversibly destroying the faceplate. The before shots.
The after shots. Middle of plastic backing cut out, leaving about 4 millimeter of plastic at the edges of the display. For reasons of picture clarity the display was replaced in its holder before taking the picture. Using scientific methods (it looked right while eyeballed) it was decided that 4 millimeters is just enough material to securely hold the display while the middle part thats cut out leaves big enough hole to light up the whole display. Removing the middle part was easy. After removing the actual display unit just cut through the backing using razor sharp knife. Having irreversibly voided the warranty, (there is no way on earth that Duratrax agrees that the charger left its factory in this state, not even if I brush the dust of my halo,) its off to the scariest part. Maybe not the scariest part, but this was the step that was most likely to cost lots (comparatively) of money if screwed up.
Step 3:
Removing the backing from the display. The display is fragile glass. Too much pressure in the wrong place and it will break. I wasn’t going to remove backing (it’s not absolutely necessary and is just another thing Duratrax will deny having done themselves) but with it in place the back lighting would have been dimmer. The backing is just a thin film that reflects light. What it actually does and pay attention now, this is absolutely brilliant. The backing reflects the light that falls on the front of the display so the display is back lit by the light falling on it from the front. The letters on the display cant be seen in normal light if there is no light from the back.
Anyway, after removing the backing, the back of the display is covered with ugly sticky goo. Its best cleaned off using Ethanol and lot of cotton pins.
Step 4:
The material for the back light unit is as follows:
- Plexiglas-plate 3 millimeter thick, measuring 55 X 75 millimeters.
- Chrome/Mirror adhesive vinyl film.
- Sandblasted clear adhesive vinyl film.
- 4 Bright blue LED diodes. Mine are 4-5 volts, youll see later why thats important.
The building of the back light unit is started by shaping the Plexiglas by dremeling slots in the long edge for the LEDs. See the thousand words here below.
The drawing further below is from this direction. –>
The finished Plexiglas, well the dremeling is finished. If you don’t know what dremel is, do a search on Google. dremeling is when you use the dremel. As you can see I made 2 copies of the Plexiglas, the second one is for backup should some bad things happen to the first one. In the top left corner is item number two in the items list, the Chrome/Mirror vinyl film. In the top right corner is its opponent, the third placed sandblast vinyl film. Put it all together to create the back lighting unit.
Below is the first test using LEDs to light up the base of the back light unit to be. Yuk! Its a beginning, but there is a long way to go.
For your information, light is invisible, also colored light, like blue light. For you to see light, it has to fall on something solid. Something has to be stopping the light. (You may believe that light is the fastest thing in the world. No matter how fast light moves; the dark is always there before it. Hehe, prove me wrong). Plexiglas is good carrier of light, the clear polished sides reflect the light back, and you don’t see it because it isn’t falling on anything. If you scuff the sides they stop reflecting, the light has something to fall on and because the scuffed part is not blocking the light it seems to glow.
Ok, to the purpose of the film. The sandblast film is for the light to shine on, (you could also scuff the side with sandpaper but the film gives much nicer effect). When the light shines on the film it lights up giving the illusion of glowing. The sandblast film is double in an effort to give more even lighting. The mirror films purpose is to reflect the light that shines the other way, and would be wasted at the bottom and sides, back and in doing so doubling and more evenly distribute the glow of the sandblast film. The vinyl film is laid out as the drawing below.
First the sandblast film is put on the topside, double. Then the mirror film is put on the back, over the edges and the bottom part of the front. The Plexiglas was deliberately kept oversize so that the LEDs would be some distance from the visible part of the back light, hidden by the mirror film on the bottom front.
Since the Plexiglas is 3 mm thick but the LEDs are 5 mm thick some clever engineering is in order to make the LEDs fit inside the Plexiglas. Unfortunately, since I don’t have access to the technology used in the making of Mary Poppins bag of holding, I had to use my brains. And no. Not as a blunt instrument. The ideas you get, they are just plain weird, where on earth do you get them from. Lets rephrase this. For this I had to think. Grumble, grumble, people these days, no respect humph. OK. Now that Ive turned off the smoke detectors I can start working on making the LEDs thinner. Sounds like Stephen King novel, doesn’t it? Yet another drawing so you will understand what I mean.
Notice that one leg of the diode is shorter and the diode has flat side right next to the short leg. This leg is minus. (-). The long leg is plus. (+). Mix them up and none of the LEDs will ever light up.
After modifying the LEDs it is soldering time. Yummy. Just look at the LEDs here soldered all together, so evenly spaced and fine. True work of art if I may say so myself. There are 4 LEDs connected in series here, each one is for 4 volts. The series connection shares the 12 volts that the LEDs will be connected to. Voltage shared is voltage halved, in this case twice shared because there are 4 LEDs. The voltage share of each LED is 3 volts, safely within the LED limit of 4 volts and keeps the electric circuit very simple. This is known as taking the cheap route and is considered unsafe and dirty trick. The bad thing is that if one LED dies they all go out.
Oh yes. Not its time to finish the back light unit. Push the LEDs into the slots in the Plexiglas, glue them with some nice clear glue that is lying around. Use Duck-tape or similar to insulate the wires, like I did.
I don’t like to brag. Ok I tell a lie. I do like to brag. But this is beautiful.
Step 5:
Here comes Johnny, or here comes the hard part. This step is about putting things back together. For this step Ill let the picture do most of the talking.
Inserting the display in the faceplate. The white line at the top is foam double-tape; it holds the display in place.
The white frame around the display is more foam double-tape. The tape will hold the back light unit in place.
Back light unit taped in place.
Testing the back light. Its an evil thing. Yeah baby.
Ready to close charger, notice the little white plugs used to connect the back light to the charger.
Electrical connection of back light. The wires for the back light are simply connected to the power input wires. The plugs are just for convenience. Put them together and close the charger, screw the end plates on. Viola, Its finished. Please pat me on my back.
Just a reminder of how nice it looks. As you can see the display is brighter at the bottom where the LEDs are.
This can be solved by moving the LEDs to the sides or add another set of LEDs at the top.
It could also be fun to add variable resistor to adjust brightness. The next Ice I modify will be better.
Last some wiring diagrams.
This article is re-posted with the author’s (Andsetinn) permission.
Hi Shannon,
Feel free to post it. The only thing I forbid is for someone to use it, or parts of it, as part of their own work.Andsetinn
Disclaimer: This article is provided for information purposes only. Rochester R/C accepts no responsibility for any damages incurred from following the below “How To” guide. By taking apart your Duratrax Ice Charger you are VOIDING your warranty. Use at your own risk.
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