IUnknown

Gomer,
You should bring these to the convention to show them off

Gomer

I just may have to!

so far plants are pearling and really good growth

redstrat

Very interesting... so how much is this whole setup running you just out of curriosity, if you dont mind me asking?

Gomer

expenses are relative because when I decided to do this project, I already had everything except the actual LED and those set me back ~ $45. The whole project however is probably in the $100-120 range if I had to get everything from scratch.

schaadrak

That looks awsome, great job.

Keep us updated on this, I'm very interested in how well these will work in the long run. When I was researching LED's the main problem I found people to have was the quality of the light as well as the intensity seemed to drop dramatically during the first six months or so. But none of those set-ups were the same type of LED you have, so it'll be nice if those were just quality issues with their brands.

Gomer

pasted to first post.

dan2ktj

Looks great Tony!

Who did you order the Luxeons from?

Thanks,
Dan

Gomer

Future electronics

A warning to anyone contemplating doing a project like this. ...this isn't a plug and play project. very real concerns must be addressed with: isolation, thermal demands, and propermatching of LEDs to drivers.

gpimm

Exellent work!

I going to have to try these out. I like the high intensity from a small emiter. Great lighting effects.

Yep, LED's put out lots of heat. For the folks that don't know how to figure out the heat load the calculaton is a simple Ohm's law calculation. Per LED the waste heat is voltage across the LED times the current through the LED. Voltage in volts, current in Amps.

As an example, say that Gomer cranks up the LED's to 1amp. The power disapated using the typical voltage numbers from Phillips goes like this...

3.72 volts time 1 amp for a power of 3.72 watts for each LED. As there 12 LED's in use the total power disapation is 3.72*12 or 44.6 watts. This is a lot of heat to get rid of. If the LED's are at the max voltage that Phillips specs, the total watts would be 1*4.95*12=59.4 watts.

Another angle to keep in mind is solid state devices need to be kept quite cool compared to other variations of light generators. The lower the maximum temp, the larger the thermal emiter (heat sink) needs to be to get rid of the heat.

This much heat just about guarantees that a fan cooled hood will be nessasary.

Enough rambling for now.

Gary

Gomer

http://webfiles.uci.edu/algomez/K2/P1010001.avi

even with a craptastic video recording on a camera, it does shimmer