Adding lights to your drone/quadcopter or flying wing is a great way to keep it visible and really adds to the experience when racing, both for pilots and spectators. When it comes to lighting up your drone with LEDs, there are a few options available. The most popular are flexible single colour LED strips/ribbons and programmable RGB LEDs, but there is another option. In today’s review we are taking a quick look at the Diatone RGB LED Board, which provides the ease of a single colour LED strip, with the customisation of an RGB board. If you are thinking about how to add LEDs to your drone, this is a great option.
You can buy the Diatone RGB LED Board now on Banggood, Amazon and GearBest.
The Diatone RGB LED Board only requires a power connection, so no messing around with your flight controller to programme colours. Instead, you choose which colour you want using three dip switches mounted to the front of the board. This makes it very quick and easy to change colours, for example between heats of a race. The dip switches allow you to switch each of the three colours (red, green and blue) on or off individually. By having one, two or all three of the dip switches/LED’s on at the same time, you can achieve up to seven different colours. This is more than enough to give each pilot their own colour, as getting this many people in the air without video quality issues is the bigger problem.
Installing the LED boards is very easy since all they require is a power supply. I opted for the 16V option from Banggood, as this is compatible with 4S LiPo packs. Once you have power wired to the board, all you need to do is install it on your craft! The boards are small enough to position anywhere you like, my favourite spots are on the arms or across the rear stand-offs, as you can see in the video below.
As you can see, these LEDs are really bight and are visible from a reasonable distance (even through a low quality DVR)!
Diatone RGB LED Board Review – Verdict
The ease of use and incredibly low price makes using this board a no brainer for me. It’s so simple and quick to install, but still gives you the options of multiple different colours. Additionally, if you don’t want LEDs on for a certain flight, it’s easy to switch them off completely thanks to the dip switches.
You can buy the Diatone RGB LED Board now on Banggood, Amazon and GearBest.
Check out all the colours below: