My el cheapo DIY LED lighting

[lorby]

Thought I might share some of my experiences with DIY LED lighting.

Hey all, thought I might share my el cheapo DIY LED light

Start off with a scrap piece of aluminium I found in the shed and clean it up a bit:

15 cree LED's purchased from Dealextreme, $3-4 each. Stuck down with thermal adhesive from DX $6 for 50gm 8 white, 2 green and 5 blue:

Another piece of scrap I took from work, holds 4 green on/off switches and 3 100k potentiometers.

3 meanwell LDD-700 LED drivers running off a spare dell 20v laptop adapter. Each driver runs 5 LED's with the 20v adapter. They cost $14 each

Here's the finished product running on low. I'll try and get some more pics with everything on full and the blue set of 5 on a new driver (you can't see any blues because the driver died :().

As you can see, even though I'm only running 2 green's they are quite overpowering.

All dimming is controlled by an arduiono'>http://arduino.cc/]arduiono uno R3 board

This is the little control panel. 1 master switch connected to the DC adapter input. 3 individual switches connected to the dc input to each driver (taken from the master switch). and 3 potentiometers hooked up to the arduino board. The arduino also supplies the regulated 5v DC power to each potentiometer. 1 knob for each driver :).

The mess

Running on ~20%, didn't want to blind myself while taking the pic!

[lorby]

Full tank shots in operation

Now my next LED light project:

Made from a whiteboard pen tray they were throwing out at work. Cut 2x 2 foot lenghts and bolted them together for the housing. Running 6 whites, 2 reds and 2 blues, all cree's.

[durro68]

cool really impressed ... if only I was motivated to do this myself ...

[Dean]

that is great DIY. i wish i new more about making lights.

the light in the tank looks so clean and bright. do you know what light it creates ?

i use T5HO 10,000k tubes are the leds like this or are they a different type of light?

[Heavyd]

Very nice light unit. Can you provide some more info about how you wired it up to the Arduino board? i.e Is it difficult to setup?

I went down the path of the meanwell drivers with a dimming unit.

[lorby]

Dean: These don't go as high as 10k, but should provide a good spectrum for the plants to use (If I recall they go from around 4-8k). The individual LED's don't provide a bigger spectrum like fluros do, that's why you have to mix the colours. Apparently red and blue leds are the best for plant growth and the whites provide the viewing pleasure :P. Unfortunately I'm missing the reds on this one so I will definitely have to fix that soon! I think green is pretty useless I just wanted to see what the tank would look like with them.

Heavyd: Fancy seeing you on here to :P. I'm hoping to take a look at your shrimp setup tomorrow as well . The arduino was a little bit of a learning curve, but I'm on the OCAU computing forums and the guys there were extremely helpful.

Basically the drivers I got have a pin for dimming control by PWM (pulse width modulation, it's like a digital form of dimming). But I need anologue control (the pots on the top with knobs attached) So the arduino has up to 5 anologue inputs, and converts them to a digital PWM code on the outputs using some code that I can provide if you like). IT runs off a 12v AC adapterand has a 5v regulator that I can hook the potentiometers up to.

So the arduino puts 5 volts to the pots > the pots vary that from 0-5v by turning it and send that to an input on the arduino. The arduino copde than says. 0 volts on the input = 0% PWM on the output and 5 volts on the input = 100% PWM on the output. and everything in between.

I hope that makes a teensy bit of sense, I haven't finished my coffee yet :P