LED lights build thread

well i will be totally honest, i wish i new what ANY of those words meant, but good luck! glad to here someone's "living on the edge" ;D

 

Hahaha ok well i give up for tonight. It didnt come out very good...
basicly a PCB is a "printed circuit board" it what you use to solder components to. This allows things to stay all neat and clean and much easier to work with as far as the components are concerned. For example this is a PCB http://www.silvercircuits.com/PCB2.gif

So what i did was this.... If you get a blank board which is a sheet of plastic that is covered in a thin layer of copper... you can design the layout of the components on the computer, print it, and use an iron to transfer the ink from the paper to the blank board. Then you mix 2 parts hydrogen peroxide with one part muratic acid (into a PLASTIC container) you just made a DIY etchant. When you add the circuit board with the printed layout you designed into the mixtue it will begin to disolve the copper. The first bit of copper to dissolve will be the exposed copper. So you can pull it out once you are left with just the copper under the ink, wash it off and you just made your own PCB.

 

ahhh i see, thanks for explaining it to me

 

Those are some expensive legos ;D

Cool project by the way.

 

bright leds

Dude I have the same idea try looking for the square led's they are alot brighter.

 

great work - just out of interest what k are these, i ask as i'm thinking of rigging a light using 8-10 of these
Brilliance 6watt V3 GU10 LED

for softies and fish = will let you know the outcome

keep up the great work

 

those work just as well but if i were you id use the same concept with different LED's...they make LED bulbs like that in any style base you want so you arent limited to the G4 base. The other issue i see with the lamps you linked to would be the viewing angle at 45 degrees may come up short depending on the width of the tank. The last issue i see with the lamps you linked is that the are only offered in a 3000k or 5000k rating so you will need to supplement actinic light unless you use them for a FW planted tank or refugium.

 

My head hurts, I need to lay down now LOL! Great build thread! So this settles it... Roger is not the only crazy person working at AAT!;D I will be following this thread closely, I have wanted LED's since I started my tank!

 

I CHEATED AND JUST USED CHRISTMANS LIGHTS I WAS GOING TO
take them apart and make circuit boards and the i thought

why they did all the work for me i could make it look nicer hut it will be hidden in the canapoy

the guy in the pic is not me just my friend

 

ok well i am back to work on this project... I added some cool feature to the design i canned the analog controller and decided to go digital.... I found this company that make some pretty cool products so i ordered some samples and i am awaiting for them to arrive.... So, now instead of having the faders to control the color mixing/intensity of the leds i will be using a highly integrated,30W, 4 channel-RGB(w) LED driver that is dmx512-a compatible. This driver has 15 bit resolution per channel!!!

Then i plan to use a usb-dmx controller to write the programs on my computer and be able to save them on the controller so i can bring them up at anytime without having to be connected to the computer. Then driver has a port to connect a momentary contact switch to let you cycle through your programs with just a push of a button. Finally, i'll be using a network dimmer that integrates with the LED driver so i will be able to adjust the intensity of any of the 4 channels from 0%-100% independently or simultaneously so i will have fine tune controls over color temp or intensity without the hassel of having to plug the whole fixture back into the computer and rewriting software!!

Some other cool feature that you can integrate into this driver is a LED thermal sensor that can display real time thermal characteristics of the LEDs by use of a probe... and another feature i found pretty cool with this driver is that it has a a jumper block that allows you to set the output current to be limited at 350mA, 460mA, 700mA, or 900mA!! which is awesome because it makes it so versatile for a wide variety of applications in case i ever choose to upgrade or downgrade!

Stay Tuned