I have used LED’s from http://www.braincube-aero.com/ for quite a while on RC aircraft, and I have installed Nav and Landing lights on my Hex.
The Braincube controllers logic circuits use the receiver power supply rather than the LED supply, so there will be some current draw here, but it is well below the 40mA limit of the A pins on the APM, in the region of 3-4mA. (the information was supplied to me by Braincube support)
Would there be a problem to use the APM 2.6 A6 pin out as the power supply for the logic circuit based on the above information.
As long as you’re under the 40 mA there shouldn’t be a problem. But on the website you link to it lists “receiver current” at 100 mA. It wasn’t exactly clear to me but it looks like you can just hook the high power LEDs up to your main battery and the logic/switcher up to something less? And the Braincube staff told you it was only a few mA to run that logic board? Then what’s the 100 mA value mean? In theory it sounds OK…
From: BrainCube Aeromodels Ltd [mailto:support@www.braincube-aero.com]
Sent: Friday, 10 January 2014 8:28 PM
To: Graham R Harding
Subject: Re: Power Consumption
I’ve just bench run a FlightLights v4 controller through the ammeter and that gives a current draw of 7.6mA even when simulating a rotating beacon (the most current heavy due to the 120Hz switching). The 100mA stated in the manual, website etc, was basically me being over-cautious. In a normal RC plane or helicopter, 100mA is a trivial amount compared to the servos yet it still gave me loads of head room in case I wanted to increase the brightness of the status LED or whatever. In the case of the new FlightLights v5 controller, this is exactly what I’ve done.