Review of the Briksmax LED Light Kit BX483 for Boutique Hotel

 

Hey brick fans, welcome back to Bricks and Figs!  Today I'll be reviewing the Briksmax LED light kit for the Lego Boutique Hotel.   As you can see from the picture above, the hotel looks amazing with all of the interior and exterior lighting.

Briksmax provided me with this awesome light kit to review so I wanted to share with you some behind the scenes shots of what goes into lighting up a modular building.   Check out their huge assortment of light kits on the Briksmax website.

Power Supply

If you've never lit up a Lego set, you might be wondering where the power comes from.

Briksmax provides a USB plug and battery pack (3 batteries required, but not included) to power all the lights in the kit.  If you don't want to use the double A battery pack, you can attach the USB plug directly into a USB power source.

The boutique hotel has an unused area in the corner, so I took the opportunity to make a small cubby to hold the provided battery pack and one of two first floor expansion boards.  This isn't required by Briksmax, but I thought it would make all the wires look less messy.  

Hotel Lobby, Art Gallery and Outdoor Bar

On the lower level I used a total of three 6 port expansion boards:

1.  for the streetlamp, hotel lobby ceiling and the upper floors of the hotel.  

2. for the room keys light and front entrance lights

3. for the adjoining art gallery and outdoor bar lighting

I placed one expansion board under the stairwell inside the first floor and the other sits outside behind the art gallery.  The boutique hotel came with a dumpster behind the art gallery, but I decided to remove it from my set so that I could accommodate the battery pack and expansion board.

Briksmax provides step by step instructions in the provided manuals, but I decided to freestyle my lighting runs.  In the pic above, I used my own 1x2 technic hole brick to feed the connecting wires from the power supply into an expansion port inside the building.  I did this to avoid crimping the wires under the bricks.

At this junction, power is distributed three ways:

1. Feed wire to the El cubo Art gallery expansion board and hotel main floor lighting expansion board (see the powers supply pic).

2. Feed wire to the wireless contact point between the first and second floor (see pic above).  I deviated from the instructions by placing all of my wireless contact pads for each floor in the hotel stairwell.  The wireless connectors supplies all of the power to light each floor of the hotel.

3. Exterior street lamp connection.

Briksmax provides a light-up streetlamp to replace the standard one that comes with the hotel.  The wiring for the street light is connected to the expansion board under the stairwell.

The wireless contact pad provides power to the art gallery ceiling light and it's dedicated expansion board.

See how the colour changing LED light transforms the static sculpture into a vibrant work of art.

The lighting for the El Cubo sign is a bonus add-on by Briksmax.

Here's the ceiling light strip for the art gallery ceiling. All the wires to light the outdoor bar terminate at the expansion board pictured above.

Here's the underside of the first floor ceiling.  The wireless connector feeds power to the light strip and then upwards to the next floor.

Hotel Second Floor

In their lighting kit, Briksmax provides LED lights for the desk lamp and bedside lamps (see orange circles), but I chose not to apply them, since my focus is just having the general interior lit up from the ceiling lights.

It's not pretty but here is the ceiling lighting for the second floor of the hotel.  Power from the wireless connector goes to an expansion board that connects the main LED light strip and three other LED dot lights.  In addition to the light strip, I put a dot light in the stairwell, the small bedroom and in the entrance to the larger bedroom. A wire feed will forward the power to the third floor.  I used my own circular gray pieces to hold the wires in place, but it's probably a cleaner look if you hide the wires under the long white plate pieces as per the Briksmax instructions.

Hotel Third Floor

The third floor wireless connector will power the ceiling lights and the light in the spire on the roof.

Briksmax provides led lights for the TV and bedside tables but again I chose not to use them opting only to use ceiling lighting.

For the third floor, I've placed dot lights on the ceiling bathroom, in the ceiling rotunda and in the stairwell, and the larger strip light all terminated to the expansion board.  The spire light on the rooftop also feeds down into the same expansion board.

The orange pointer shows you where the LED light is situated.

Summary

So here is a complete list of all the Briksmax components I used to light up the boutique hotel modular building.

- battery pack

- usb plug

- 5 expansion boards

- 4 strip lights

- 13 dot lights

- 1 colour changing dot light

- 1 light standard

- 4 sets of wireless connector pin/pads

Briksmax provides some substitute Lego parts to use as well.  I also supplemented these parts with my own to make it a bit more custom, but you can achieve the same results by just following the Briksmax instructions.  I can make use of the unused lighting parts in future building block sets.

As you can see, there's not a lot of exposed wires showing for the viewable areas.

Here's a few more shots in the dark around the hotel.

I didn't have any defective parts in my kit but if you did, Briksmax will send you free replacement parts if required.  I've used other LED light kits before Briksmax, but find that they give me the most flexibility in choosing what I want to install.  Their instructions are easy to follow as well.

If you missed my Briksmax lighting kit unboxing post, you can find it here.

Well, that's it, hope this post helped you to decide whether Briksmax is the right kit for your Lego lighting needs.  Bye for now!

Unboxing the Briksmax BX483 LED Light Kit for the Boutique Hotel

 

Hi brick fans!  Here's a quickie unboxing post about the new Briksmax BX483 LED light kit for the Lego Boutique Hotel.  Let's see what we get in the box that Briksmax has kindly provided to us to review.

Opening the light kit for the Boutique Hotel, everything is packaged and wrapped up nicely.

There are two instruction manuals, one user guide and a customer service card.  The manuals provide the detailed step by step instructions on how to integrate the light kit into your set. The user guide describes some of the components and how to attach them together.  The customer service card has contact information for assistance and if you need replacement parts for missing or damaged items.

All of the lighting apparatus is packaged in these static free pouches.

Pouches with the letter A contain the different LED lights, differentiated by the length of the attached wire.  Wire lengths typically come in 15cm and 30cm lengths.

Pouches that start with the letter B contain the brighter LED light strips which come in different lengths, either 4 stud or 6 studs long.

Pouches starting with the letter D contain the connecting wires and expansion boards for the LED lights.  There are different sizes of expansion boards and different lengths of connecting wires.  In my kit, the shorter 6 port expansion boards were incorrectly labelled as 8 port expansion boards.  The pouch should have said D01 instead of D02.

Pouches labelled with the letter F contain the wireless contact pieces which supply power to each level of the boutique hotel building without wires.

There is a pouch containing all the spare pieces you might need to modify your set to adapt the light kit to it.  If you are a Lego purist, you will be pleased to note that Briksmax provides real Lego pieces for the kit.   The pouch labelled D09/G01 contains the USB plug and adhesive pads for attaching the expansion boards to the building walls or ceilings.

Finally, pouch C02 contains the custom street lamp.  Pouch E06 contains the battery pack (uses 3 double As, not provided).  And also included in every light kit is this useful set of tweezers to handle small and delicate parts.

The Briksmax LED light kit is available through their website or their affiliated retailer Lightailing.com.  Use my discount code ITSNOTLEGO to save an extra 10% off your entire purchase.

In my next post, I'll review the installation of the Briksmax BX483 LED light kit into my boutique hotel.

First Project in 2022: Lighting the not Lego Blade Runner Spinner MOC C5177

Hi alt brick fans, hope you are all doing well!  

I've got another project on the table, this time it's lighting this not Lego Blade Runner Spinner MOC C5177.   The lighting I'll be using was generously provided by Lightailing.com.

The Blade Runner Spinner has always been a favourite model of mine, it just looks very futuristic.  The building block set featured is C5177 which you can get off Aliexpress. It's a copy of the Rebrickable version by designer MOMatteo79.

Here are some images of the spinner I found on the internet.  Whenever you see it, the lights are always on, so for my model, I wanted to recreate that effect.

I already have the model of the spinner already, but I didn't want to tear it apart in case my lighting project didn't work out as planned.  I also wanted to keep one around to use as a reference.  

So I bought another one from >Aliexpress .  It comes with seven bags of parts and an instruction manual.

Here's some sample pages from the manual.

These are all the parts for the Blade Runner spinner moc.  I figured it would be an easier task of integrating the lighting as I built the model from scratch, rather than taking apart the old model.

Lightailing.com has lighting kits for almost every Lego set on the market, but they didn't have one for this moc set.  When I inquired about what parts I would need to light the spinner, Lightailing was really helpful and they promptly researched it and came up with everything I would need.  

Here's what Lightailing sent me:  LED lights in various colours, white, blue, red and yellow, expansion boards and connecting cables, two types of power supplies (battery and USB plugs) and a multi-function board that makes the lights blink on and off.  With all these accessories, it would be up to me to figure out how to put everything together and make it work the way I wanted.

Two packs of 15cm white LED lights (3 lights per pack).

Three packs of 15cm blue LED lights (3 lights per pack).

Three packs of 15cm red LED lights (3 pieces per pack).

Two packs of 15cm yellow LED lights (3 pieces per pack).

One pack of 6 port expansion boards (3 pieces per pack).

One pack of 8 port expansion boards (3 pieces per pack).

Two packs of 5cm connecting cables (3 pieces per pack).

Two packs of 15 cm connecting cables (3 pieces per pack).

Two packs of USB cables (1 piece per pack).

One AAA battery pack and one multi-function board.

The multi-function board is approx 1 inch square and has one input port (power) and two output ports (for alternating the blinking lights).  The black knob is used to control blinking speed and the black lever controls the blink rate.

This was the first test of the led lighting which I attached to the underside of the spinner.

I fed the wires up into the passenger compartment and ran them out the rear of the spinner.

Next step was adding side marker lights and the center head lights.  So there are a total of 6 LED lights at the front of the vehicle. At this point I began to realize that I might need to create a cavity in the trunk of the spinner for all the wiring and expansion boards.

Testing out the flashing rear side marker lights.

Attached a couple more lights underneath, so there are a total of 6 flashing LED lights here.

Here's a close up of the roof lights.  The yellow lights are non blinking, but the center white light and the red and blue lights are blinking.  Seven lights in total on the roof.

Let's see if we can jam all this stuff into the trunk! I have one expansion board for the non blinking front lights, two expansion board for the alternating blinking lights, and one expansion board for the remainder of the non blinking lights in the rear, plus all the connecting cables.

Tried to tidy up all the wiring.  Here's a video I posted on Youtube.

 

Another Youtube video I made.

All of the LED lighting used was from the brand BriksMax, which you can get at Lightailing.com.  Unlike some other branded kits where they have a USB plug on every light, the Lightailing ones plug into an expansion board, which makes it really easy to chain lights together like I did in this model.  I found the LED lights, cables and expansion boards very easy to use and they were very high quality.  

For my spinner, I have a choice of power supply options, I can either use the the USB connector which you can plug into an optional USB hub, or you can use the battery pack if you don't have a USB power source nearby.  Please leave your comments or questions below!   Bye for now!