So, having gotten much of the body painted a big next step is getting the lights in place!
I ordered a pre-soldered light kit with a small circuit board with some code to set the LEDs to blink and change color at seemingly random intervals. What this allows me to do is worry simply about mounting the lights rasther than needing to buy a circuit board, program it to light LEDs, and solder each LED individually onto the board. These tasks are all trivial, but fairly time consuming. As such, I didn’t see it as necessary to do myself – especially since as an amateur at soldering I felt like somewhere in the 200 or so lights I’d inevitably make a very frustrating mistake. In the below pictures you can see the holes where LEDs/detail would go and how I had to dremel/sand it down to get the edges flush, as well as a picture of the assembled lights.
Mounting the lights was a relatively simple process, all I had to do was wire them all together to the main circuit board by daisy chaining them, cut the appropriate slots into the dome, and glue them in place. Additionally, each set of lights comes with a small filter, for lack of a better word, that makes it look like a light panel, as opposed to a bunch of individual LEDs. The effect is actually pretty impressive – the video below illustrates the effect.
It was very satisfying to get the LEDs in place! With lights working, K4-G8 really feels like he’s starting to come to life!