DIY LED Using 10 Watt Arrays

[hillegom]

looking good

[daplatapus]

Nice job Mike. I actually kind of like the 3 ribs on top.
FYI, when you have to wrap a curve like that, see if your supplier carries wiggle wood. It's a 1/4" plywood, but all the layers are oriented the same direction so it can roll up to something like a 4" diameter circle. Extremely useful, and you don't end up with those little curling edges that are always trying to straighten them selves like regular ply does.

[mike31154]

Some progress on the cover and replacing outer rails of lights with larger heatsinks, sans fans. Heatsinks are mounted on larger 1 inch aluminum u-tube than when I did the center one, so more material to draw away heat. The center rail has been running fine without fans & the 3/4 inch u-tube for some time now, no issues with the LEDs, so not sure whether I'll redo that one with the 1 inch material. Still need to yank the old rails & mount the LEDs on the new ones, but lights are on at the moment. Might get it done tonight.

Came up with some artistry to vent the cover. A bit of work with all the drilling, but I think it should look & be pretty cool once I have it stained & mounted.

[hillegom]

wow nice
You are not only into electronics, but an artist as well
Well done

[daplatapus]

That looks sweet Mike, Nice work!

[mseepman]

Nicely Done!

[mike31154]

Thank you for the encouragement everyone! It's most welcome. I was up until past midnight yesterday replacing those two stupid outer rails of LEDs. Another few hours this morning hooking the wires back up.

The cover does have some flaws, a few cracks & tears from drilling the larger holes & stresses from bending. Don't show up in the photos! Nice thing about wood is that I should be able to patch it up & once the stain is on, will be harder to see the booboos. Will take a few more days until I finish it up. It certainly will be nice to have the mess of wiring covered up. I've read more than the odd post where folks tend to shy away from DIY fixtures due to the industrial look of the end product. Next build will probably involve a canopy, so it won't matter!

Electrical & instrumentation was my trade in the Air Force. I've taken on a few woodworking projects over the years since I enjoy that as a hobby. I work on my old 'yota & motorbikes too. I tend to take forever to finish stuff though.

[mike31154]

Originally Posted by daplatapus

Nice job Mike. I actually kind of like the 3 ribs on top.
FYI, when you have to wrap a curve like that, see if your supplier carries wiggle wood. It's a 1/4" plywood, but all the layers are oriented the same direction so it can roll up to something like a 4" diameter circle. Extremely useful, and you don't end up with those little curling edges that are always trying to straighten them selves like regular ply does.

Thanks for the heads up on the "wiggle wood". I'd never heard of that. Too late in the game for me now to rebuild the top, but certainly will keep my eye out for that stuff for future projects. I had also considered veneer, but that's pretty thin & actually quite costly compared to a piece of 1/8 " plywood. You can probably see the 'waves' along the bottom edge of the cover in the photos where the standard plywood didn't co-operate. I'll have to apply something along there to straighten it out, perhaps some gold coloured aluminum trim. The thing is starting to get heavy now though, with the larger heatsinks & cover.

[mike31154]

Took longer than I had hoped to get the additional dimmers I needed after cooking the one that was overloaded with too many 10 watt LEDs. They finally arrived yesterday & I've wired them in so each of the 3 LED rails now has 2 dimmers controlling the mix of white & bue. Previously I had 2 dimmers on the center rail, but only a single dimmer for each outer. Should have fixed that long ago, but let it slide until there was smoke. Bad idea.

At the moment the center rail has fired up & I'm still waiting for the outers to kick in which won't be for a few more hours. Once they're on, I'll adjust & take voltage/current readings. Everything should now be well within the 8 amp limit for each dimmer, even when I crank the voltage to near max. Vf for the LEDs.

This is how it was:



Here's the latest config. with larger power supplies & 2 more dimmers:



I've dispensed with the voltmeters since I wasn't really using them for daily monitoring. Since I don't have a controller & simply use timers to run the lighting schedule, I'll dial in a voltage, check that & current with my multimeter & see how things go with the livestock for a while. It appears nothing suffered too much during the past month with none of the Royal Blues running, so I'll just play it safe for a while & keep things running at a Vf that's comfortably below the max Vf for the LEDs.

[_Adrian_]

Nice Job...

I would change a few things though...
1.- Dimmers are a catch 22 - Loss of voltage as well as current limiting. You need to find a better solution as this is already getting complex and will impact the life of LED's and could be a potential fire hazard.

2.- Running LED's in series still means the same amperage draw just need more voltage. Ex.: 4 5v drawing 500mA each in series will require 20V @ 500mA but in parallel it would be 5v @ 2A. High draw situations the heat is generated.
The LED's im planning to use are rated for 9-12V at 900mA but will run 4 per string ( for a combined maximum voltage of 48V. This means one 48V 10A power supply can drive about 40x 10W LED arrays at 95% load.

3.- Move to a larger heat sink, loose the fans and gain back your hearing LOL

4.- Start looking at an light controller, whetever its off the shelf or Arduino based. This would allow you to recreate solar and lunar cycles and being able to fade in and out and recreate more other weather related events ( Ex: storms ). There's Tons of PWM controlled LED drivers that are fair priced, and readily available.

All this ends up reducing heat output, you'll end up extending the life of the LED, makes the system more stable and easier to use/maintain most of all