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Thursday 8 May 2014

Ten watt led

The 10 watt LED arrived. It wants 9-10 volts and a maximum of 1000 milliamps. So I soldered up a driver.

The driver consists of: a 16v Lipo battery, feeding a step-down board that lets me adjust the voltage, going via an ammeter to the LED.

At 8 volts, the LED is just about glowing. At 9.6 volts, it's so bright I can't look at it, and it's pulling 500 milliamps, so that's about 5 watts. I could turn the wick up some more, but I put a thermometer on it, and it was getting hot.

So, I'll need to mount it on a heat sink (a lump of aluminium, or maybe copper; I can use something from an old CPU fan. I also need something to make it blink (I have something on order that might work).

I've also got a 3w red LED on its way to me. Now that I've shown that I can drive the white LED, I'm pretty confident that I can drive the red one.

Also - I've ordered daughter.1's birthday present. It'll be a surprise!

2 comments:

  1. I'm sure it will be!! She doesn't want a battery pack for a motorised bike!! :)

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  2. Good, because I didn't get her one.

    ReplyDelete