{"id":1164,"date":"2025-03-10T21:19:05","date_gmt":"2025-03-10T21:19:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bluemarble.ch\/wordpress\/?p=1164"},"modified":"2025-11-21T13:29:24","modified_gmt":"2025-11-21T13:29:24","slug":"how-to-convert-a-boeing-lightplate-to-led-backlighting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bluemarble.ch\/wordpress\/2025\/03\/10\/how-to-convert-a-boeing-lightplate-to-led-backlighting\/","title":{"rendered":"How to convert a Boeing Lightplate to LED Backlighting"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Boeing 737 classic aircraft use cockpit panels which are backlighted by incandescent bulbs. They are driven by 5V (not 28V like all other bulbs, so please don’t burn them, it happened to me). The bulbs are connected in parallel, they are directly soldered onto a PCB and fit through holes into the semi-transparent backplate. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Unfortunately, after 30+ years those incandescent bulbs are not that effective any more and the backlight is rather dim. They also draw quite some power as you can imagine (more than 1A per lightplate).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I have now fitted 12V LED strips (using 120 LED’s per meter) in pairs of 3 LED’s to the lightplate and thus had to drill another two holes per bulb hole:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The result is fascinating. A more even distributed backlighting which is much brighter and is dimmable by a PWM mosfet driver from a common microcontroller PWM capable GPIO output. The current drawn by the lightplate went down from 1 A to 0.2 A:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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You can for instance use the Joy-IT COM-MOSFET <\/a>driver to dim the backlight from software. It accepts 3.3V or 5.0V logic inputs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Boeing 737 classic aircraft use cockpit panels which are backlighted by incandescent bulbs. They are driven by 5V (not 28V like all other bulbs, so please don’t burn them, it happened to me). The bulbs are connected in parallel, they are directly soldered onto a PCB and fit through holes into the semi-transparent backplate. Unfortunately, … <\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[125],"tags":[174,126,258,257,259,260],"class_list":["post-1164","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-flight-simulation","tag-backlighting","tag-boeing-737","tag-incandescent-bulbs","tag-led","tag-led-stripe","tag-pwm","item-wrap"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluemarble.ch\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1164","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluemarble.ch\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluemarble.ch\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluemarble.ch\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluemarble.ch\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1164"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/bluemarble.ch\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1164\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1174,"href":"https:\/\/bluemarble.ch\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1164\/revisions\/1174"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluemarble.ch\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1164"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluemarble.ch\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1164"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluemarble.ch\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1164"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}