Thanks for the info.

I've been looking for alternatives but they do have the best one yet!

I'm in the process of setting up a new 60g cube - 24x24x24. Considering a single 18" fixture. May consider maybe 20" depending on LED options.

Still exploring LED options. Short listed to Steve's or aquastyle. Still lots of decisions to make - colors, ratios, wattage and drivers. At one point, I was thinking of the 10w LEDs but decided against it because of driver costs. Now I'm back to the 3w LEDs to get better coverage.

I have a Jarduino ready to go running the v1.2 beta 2 sketch. Now just waiting for the relay board and temperature sensors.

I've decided on the Meanwell drivers since they're waterproof IP67. Safer around water especially salt water. Model number will depend on my LED selections.

Any advice?

What's your plan for the top of your cube? If you're going with a hood that's going to cover everything anyway, I might give consideration to stock aluminum as a heat sink. However that would entail either drilling and tapping or gluing the LED's directly to it. In my mind (and my tendency to never leave well enough alone) these methods are less than desirable. I like the fact that I'll never have to purchase another heatsink again. I'll just continue to re-purpose these and change the LED's as technology and knowledge of these light fixtures develops.
If your plan is an open top with the fixture visible, these heatsinks are totally finished. It does take a bit of planning and imagination to make the wires going in and out clean, but certainly doable. I ended up drilling the heatsink and putting grommets and following the hangar I built.
My plan for my final fixture will be inside a hood mounted on moveable rails built from pocket door tack and rollers.

All my LED's have come from Milad. On my last order I was less than impressed with the packaging and shipping, but the product was good and the customer service was there to deal with my complaints.
If you're even thinking of multi chip, talk to Mike (mike31154). Nice guy and he knows tons of stuff about them. I was leaning that way after talking with him but I ended up chickening out, favouring what I knew.
My first fixture I used Inventronics drivers with the dim4 board and it was just ok. I didn't realize I wouldn't get dimming to zero and that sucked. All my lights go on 10% then ramp from there. It's amazing how bright 10% is. Might as well not even have dimming for the most part.
For my new build, I've got a wack of LDD 1000 and 700 Meanwwell drivers for the RB's, OCW's, TV's and a couple HLG's for my NW's. The OCW's and TV's are Exotic LED's and the rest are all 3W Cree's.
Ratio mix is much the eye of the beholder. I went with overkill and plan on adjusting by dimmer rather than try and get the correct mix by number of LED's. I live nowhere near anyone who runs a LED fixture so I can't really see anything in person to know what I'd call the mix I like. So, I have to figure it out on my own :)

Hope that helps somewhat. If you get to building something, start a build thread right away and keep us all posted.

I have 8 of the TV's, and like I said... overall I'm happy. The red's are just a bit deeper/darker when compared to my old MH/T5 combo, but it's pretty much a wash though, 'cuz other colors are better. (it'll be curious to see what the Cree’s will add to the mix)

Yeah, I saw that post on UK a while back about the cable.... funny thing is that my cable is only ~5" long. I might order the LCD shield from Itead, and try that if the new cable doesn't fix my problems.

I'm in the same boat as you Dom... no one around with LED's, and even the closest LFS is a bit over 3 hours from me. I also agree that it's easier to go overboard a bit, and just control the individual output lvl's, rather than to try to get the exact LED ratio

And then there were two...


http://i1177.photobucket.com/albums/...ps7ba981ae.jpg

looking good!!! Keep the pic's coming

Got the V1.2beta uploaded last night and running. I didn't play with the other version really so I'm actually not sure I see a difference, lol.
Now I need to figure out what the difference is between the UTFT library and the ITDB02_Graph16 library. I just loaded the graph16 one for now. Which are you guys running?

Over my morning coffee/breakfast I managed to pre-tin all my LED pads and jumper the RB's on the 3 up's
Even managed to keep my coffee/breakfast off the heatsink :D
6 LED clusters in total

http://i1177.photobucket.com/albums/...psdbffe1a4.jpg

Geeze, I must have been asleep at the switch when I was originally doing my planning. I went to start wiring my LED's and looked over my plan drawing and just noticed now that I had the XM-L NW's on the same strings as my XT-E's. Du'oh! Good thing I bought extra LDD's :D

I think that I read that the difference between the libraries was optimization, not sure if one is more compatible than the other or not. (I'm using ITDB32S)

Hmmm, I wonder if it's noticeable.... Oh well, I'll worry about that later. I gotta get this thing wired up :D

Worked a bit on doing some soldering. Ugh, I think my eyes are gonna start bleeding, lol. I still have to drill the heatsink and get some grommets to pass the wires through. I ended up re-working my schematic so that each heatsink is individually wired and will be running on separate drivers from one another so if anything goes wrong with one I can unplug it and not affect the other 2. Each heatsink will have a 12" "tail" with these connectors:

http://i1177.photobucket.com/albums/...pse411e84a.jpg

There will be one for the positive side and one for the negative. Should make everything nice and easy to work on or change when needed. Anyway here's where I'm at so far with the one heatsink:


http://i1177.photobucket.com/albums/...ps0a0b100a.jpg