My "bandwidth tester" LED project

Hold on to your socks folks, this one's going to be interesting.

I'm going to be building an LED fixture for my personal 120 (2x2x4) with the end goal of determining 2 things: 1) which combination of LEDs and/or intensity of thos LEDs reveals the best color rendering and overall aesthetic appearance, and 2) is this best acheived using 3W chips or 20W multichips?

To do this, I am going to build a set of fixtures for one half of the tank out of 3W Luxeon ES LEDs from Steve's LEDs, and will likely mount them on a set of Maker's heat sinks, and the other half will be an array 20W multichip LEDs mounted on individual heat sinks.

So each half will have the flexibility for me to rearrange the LED configuration if needed.

Also, I will be using DIY CAT 4101 driver boards, made by TheFishGuy65 on RC (as seen on his "DIY LED Driver" thread) which are 8-channel boards capable of driving 8 strings of 6 LEDs, and with a little modification, you can PWM dim all 8 strings separately (but I won't need to necessarily). I will be using 2 boards for each half.

The 3W array will consist of all Luxeon ES LEDs (except as noted)

30x Royal Blue

6x Warm White 2700K

6x Warm White 4000K

6x Neutral White 5000K

6x Cool White

6x Green

6x Cyan-Turquoise

6x Cool Blue

6x True Violet (generic brand)

The only reason for 6 of each of the various colors is that the driver board needs to be balanced, so it's either add more LEDs to make the string balanced or add a bunch of resistors to keep the CAT chips from going into thermal overload. Hard to describe. But many of these, namely the green, cyan, cool blue, and the whites, will be dimmed down appropriately to avoid the ugly greens, but having more means I can get more even coverage.



The 20W multichips will be from ac-rc on eBay, consisting of 2 each of 10000K, 14000K, 16000K, Hybrid 20500K/453nm, 420, 430, 445 & 453. At least that's what I have picked out so far.

The whole end goal here is to develop an arrangement of LEDs that is very pleasing and effective, then I will likely build arrays for at least 2 of the tanks I maintain.

I also will hopefully have one custom-built 200W multichip build coming up...that one could be even more interesting!

That's it for now...just enough to get y'all salivating. This should be fun!!

 

Getting one of these too

http://www.sandiegoreefs.com/forums/showthread.php?93502-5-channel-Multichip-Panel-Group-Buy

Now where is that emoticon that is drooling? /DesktopModules/ActiveForums/themes/_default/emoticons/w00t.gif

 

I got my LEDs from Steve's LEDs yesterday and my Makers LEDs heat sinks today! Going to play with these toys this weekend sometime...

 

Bwahaha!

 

Not much happening on this one yet. I did mock up a few fixtures which I used as a demo during a lighting seminar, and found that the Maker's LED heat sinks are really slick and easy to use. In just under an hour and a half, I built 2 fixtures, each with 9 LEDs, and that included looking up the info on the website about how to install the T screws, pre-tinning the LEDs, installing them, soldering the wiring, connecting to the driver, installing the end caps, etc.

I will be ordering my batch of 20W multi-chips next month sometime. The driver boards are over a month out right now so I'm not in a huge rush, but I have plenty of assembly to do. Also need some lenses and such.