Lighting your Lego City?

[F0NIX]

Here is one that sell standard LEGO lamp posts with light bulb (using 6-12v AC or DC). http://www.blokbricks.com/contents/en-us/p161.html

I have seen those at last years (2012) LEGO Fan Weekend in Skærbæk. They look really nice and have a very natural glow since they are made with micro light bulbs and not LED.

Since they are normal light bulbs and not LED they can use AC or DC voltage and when using DC it does not matter which way you connect them and makes it easier to connect many of them together.

I am not sure how much heat they give of and if that heat can damage the transparent minifig head over years of use. And I am also afraid that those bulbs are a bit more fragile than the LED. You may have to handle them carefully when they are lit and a short time after they are turned off until they have cooled down because of the way the light bulbs are made. But they are used on toy trains so they can handle some small vibrations at least. LED's can handle a lot of force and will probably take more force than a normal LEGO brick would handle before they brakes :)

[JopieK]

It is even better to use SMD LED's, I have good experiences with that.

@F0NIX: it is not that if you reverse the polarity of an LED it will be damaged, but it will get destroyed if you send too much current through it, that is why and LED need a resistor in series with it that takes away the extra current. You can look up what resistor you need using a "led resistor calculator". Every color has its' own voltage limit btw so check carefully. A resistor of 1k is most of the time good enough.

Warm white LEDs are as good as light bulbs and they consume less power, that is easier if you want to control them etc.

[Kryne]

Edit: Sorry just saw how it was done

Edited January 14, 2015 by Kryne

[3direction]

Anyone thinking of making their town all lights up?

link removed

Edited February 18, 2016 by Phred
removed link.

[Capn Frank]

Merged!

3direction, please review the Site Guidelines again. It seems like you have not read them.

Anyone thinking of making their town all lights up?

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Please stop spamming the forum for promoting blingblingbrick. I've removed the link in your post. Feel free to add a link to your signature.

We don't need three topics discussing the same thing. I've merged the two topics you bumped and the one you created into this topic. It was pointless for you to bump two old topics if you're going to create another new one discussing the same thing.

Thank you.

[ER0L]

Just for the record: You don't need third party stuff at all to light up your city. There are the (somewhat pricy, I know) PF LEDs which can be even built into minifig scale vehicles plus those great old 9 Volt Light & Sound lamps which have a nice warm light and can also be used as police lights.

All that might not be as bright as the Nonlego solutions, but well - Lego building is dealing with the imperfect, at least in my opinion.

Some more ideas on Lego lighting (without any third party stuff) you may find in this Flickr album.

[archy970]

You made a greats work with all that lighting. I try once to make something like that, one lamp post with 2 LED 3mm but is very hard to put 4 wires in the post. So I make one to try and I give up.

[MGCJerry]

I have thought about doing this very thing with the modulars that my girlfriend owns but she doesnt like the idea of modifying Lego. This looks great and I just love the results in the other pictures. I'd love to see more when you get it done. :)

I've lit a few of my "Lego cities" as a kid by building them on plates and putting the build on plywood raised by some blocks. But they were small cities (3x3 road plates). I had a powerline system under the wood that fed all the different kinds of lighting throughout. I had used and in a few locations I had "overhead" electrical lines where I could literally tap into power (3v, 5v, & 3v flash). There were also a number of flashing traffic lights (yellow & red) at the intersections. Would love to do this again once I can talk my girlfriend into us building a Lego city using our modulars and a couple of other MOD sets but thats getting a tough sell.