Installing the Turnigy 9x backlight kit
Here is a walk through on how I installed the Turnigy 9x LED backlight kit from hobbyking.com. You get a foam backing and the actual backlight panel that has a wiring harness attached to it.
As my old soldering iron is fried, and all I have my butane field iron, I am only going to do the plug and play install for now. I don’t really want to use the field iron to solder things to the TX’s logic board as it is not precise enough.
To start, I removed 6 screws on the back of the transmitter to crack it apart. I had to do this carefully as the front and back pieces are connected by a cable that has to be unplugged from the logic board.
Next I carefully unclipped the ribbon cable that was connected to the top of the logic board. This is the only cable that I disconnected for fear of damaging it when I flipped the logic board up to access the LCD panel, and tear out the old foam backing.
After this I removed the 9 screws that held the logic board in place. These are of different size so I laid them out on the table the way I had removed them so that I would not place them in the wrong place later.
With the logic board free, I now had access to remove the thick foam backing that was going to be replaced.
After a bit of tugging and prying, here is the logic board with the foam backing removed. I am going to be replacing this with the thinner one included in the kit. This is to make space for the extra thickness that the LED panel adds to the mix.
With the foam padding on, I then position the LED panel on top of the LCD panel. The instructions from hobbyking as the wiring on the right together with the 4 directional buttons. I choose instead to have mine positioned the other way as it was easier to avoid the wiring interfering with the buttons. On the left, there are only 2 buttons to contend with, and thus I had more space. The LED panel is taped in place and the logic panel with the new foam backing sits on top of it.
I secured the logic board back in place and you can see that having the wiring come from the left also made things much neater top side cause I don’t have as much excess wire to deal with.
The finished product after reassembly.