Hey Dom, the DS18B20 should be able to share a ground with the fan circuit but, yes, Chris' fan scheme might present some issues. Then again, that damn schematic he posted is so damn small I can hardly tell what's what - I'm going blind staring at that thing. Can you post a bigger version of it?

Lol, ya the original was a bit small. I got my ampehol connectors in and a buddy of mine is a mechanic who works for highways has a crimper so I should be good to go. Although because the pins are removable, I think I can actually solder my wires on.

How's this pic for size:
http://i1177.photobucket.com/albums/...ps8d293992.jpg

Wow I missed a lot here.... sorry work has been stupid the last 6 weeks.

Looks like you've made some great progress. You can use BC549, that's what I'm using as well. Just remember that the pin orientation (collector, base, emitter) is different on the 2N3904 than the bc549/547.

Yeah... that pic was small. I ended up emailing it to Dom shortly after.

Hey, there he is!
Ya I did some googling about the differences between them all and found a page there that said the pins were reversed so I hooked them up right, whew.
I'm not finished wiring that all up, but am working on it. Mounting it all on a breadboard.
I'm pretty excited about the amphenol connectors, they look awesome and will work great! Thanks for suggesting them Chris and to Mike and Scubasteve for the input for helping make my decision.

Nice to see how everything is coming together! There's still a few things I would like to do to mine, but it's hard to find the time right now.

New PCB boards with the integral pull down resistor have been ordered.

I didnt see if anyone told what you did wrong here and I know your past that but for future reference for anybody else it looks like those 2 original resistors were in parallel and by putting in a jumper you basically jumpered out your variable resistor....ie you removed the resistance from the circuit, hence the smoke!!!

Lol, I actually ended up pulling everything off the board and traced everything back to see how that thing was made.
I basically created a dead short like you said. Education is never free :)

2 ends down, 10 to go... them is a lot of wires in one little fitting...ugh

http://i1177.photobucket.com/albums/...ps8ef891c6.jpg

http://i1177.photobucket.com/albums/...ps3bd9227d.jpg

A soldering we shall go, a soldering we shall go... :music:
It's become my new habit over my morning coffee... I can think of funner ones

http://i1177.photobucket.com/albums/...ps8b33a8d2.jpg

http://i1177.photobucket.com/albums/...ps56b80022.jpg

Ok, I got one fixture almost done. Just the fan and sensor circuit to figure out. I think I'm going to run a separate 3 wire just for the fan circuit to solve my wire shortage problem. Which will be much easier to fix if I ever have a fan fail. All I'll have to do is yank the fan off the heatsink and replace rather than have to pull the whole fixture to repair it. So here's the amphenol connector all soldered up:

http://i1177.photobucket.com/albums/...psc05a8ce3.jpg

And how it looks like once it's mounted to the heatsink:
http://i1177.photobucket.com/albums/...ps73603773.jpg

I'm fairly happy with the final look of it.
And how it looks like from the back:

http://i1177.photobucket.com/albums/...ps88ad5c47.jpg

And the top with the fan and everything. The random wires still not connected are the fan PWM wires and the 3 sensor wires.

http://i1177.photobucket.com/albums/...ps4203118e.jpg

And a final shot with the actual DIY cable I made up hook in:

http://i1177.photobucket.com/albums/...ps8d253174.jpg

A couple quick questions for anyone who's done something similar:
How did you mount your temp sensor on the heatsink and where did you mount it? Directly above one of the LED stars?

I guess I'm too late with this advice, but on connectors with that many pins packed tightly together, it's often a good idea to have a piece of heatshrink on the wire before soldering. Once the pin is soldered up, slide the heatshrink down over the pin & shrink. This minimizes the chance of pins shorting together via a strand of wire or blob of solder. You did a fine job with the soldering so shorts are unlikely once things are buttoned up, but adding the heatshrink was a requirement for the work I used to do. It was great to work on the newer equipment with crimp pins that were pushed into the connector after assembly. With the proper insertion/extraction tools, these connectors were a pleasure to work on, but I wouldn't want to pay for that stuff out of my pocket.

For the temp sensor, I just drilled a partial depth hole in the heatsink, and used Arctic Silver thermal epoxy to secure it in the hole. My hope is that it will get a more accurate temp of the heatsink without being affected by the fan.

Yeah the crimp ring type with the extraction/insertion tool are really nice to work with, makes changing out a bent/broken pins a breeze. Would hate to pull apart a 30+ pin solder type connector just to change out a damaged pin.

Ya ,I actually thought of that after I'd finished the first one. But what I was able to do was heat the pin up just a hair and stretch the wire insulation down over the pin. It worked really well and once the pin cooled the insulation stayed put. :)

I did have a buddy of mine that has the amphenol crimper and everything to do it, but these pins are meant to be soldered. The wire actually slides about 1/16" or so into the pins in a little pocket. Then one it's soldered there's nothing ever going to pull these out. It tedious work to be sure, especially those middle pins, but it works well.
And ya, I didn't want to spend the dough on the real amphenol connectors either :D

Yeah, I was worried the fan would affect the sensor. With all the fins on the back of this heatsink it'll just direct all the air right by the sensor. I like the idea of half drilling through the aluminum and setting in with that thermal epoxy. Did you worry about how close you were to an actual LED location?

Thanks for the feed back!

Yeah... the crimp type are a different animal all together. They have a nice wire stripper for it that will only strip back what’s needed.

My LED’s are spaced fairly evenly, so I wasn’t too worried. I have a row of LED's on each side, with clusters down the middle of the heatsink. I have the sensor centered width wise, but slightly offset length wise, so as not be directly under the fan. I also heat shrinked each leg on the sensor, then placed another heat shrink over everything, so that it covered up all of the legs, and what part of the sensor that was sticking out of the heatsink..... Hope that makes sense. (The sensor ended up behind one of my clusters)

Just as a bit of an update, and to show I did indeed listen to you Mike :) here's a shot of the connectors and how I was able to stretch the wire insulation down a hair to protect the pins:

http://i1177.photobucket.com/albums/...psf66c151e.jpg

I got the new boards in today with the built in pull down resistors. Here's what they look like:

http://i1177.photobucket.com/albums/...ps6f9df491.jpg

And with the order they also sent me 2 of these boards. I have no idea what they're for but if either Chris or Scubasteve want them, let me know and I'll send them with your boards.

http://i1177.photobucket.com/albums/...ps8584e778.jpg

And if you guys need any 10K resistors for these boards, let me know too as I have a bunch of them as well I can send with;

http://i1177.photobucket.com/albums/...ps21453c69.jpg

I just received the same boards too. Still missing the screw terminals and jumpers.

Where did you find the sockets for the ldd drivers?

A place in Vancouver called pixel print. If I recall they are just a 18 pin machine IC socket (Dom - correct me if I'm wrong). You can get them from a number of electronic supply places.

Got mine from eBay 24 pins (wide one).

Yup, that's right, but they are 24 pin. Type this in on ebay:
5pcs x 24Pin IC Socket (Machine tool) ROHS Best Quality

There's a listing there right now and it ends up about $5 for 5 sockets and it's in Vancouver, so you won't wait 8 weeks for delivery from China.
I've seen some guys cut the legs off, but if you get a small little nail punch (and a pretty little flower covered hammer :D ) you can just punch them out easy enough.

So I bought new PCB boards with the drop down resistor to prevent the LED's from going full 100% if the board looses the pwm signal. Thanks to Scubasteve for that modification! I'm sure this will save many a coral from being baked.
But, that also means I have to de-solder all my old boards and resolder everything on the new ones... wheeeeeee!
Here's the new baord and the start of soldering the drop down resistor:

http://i1177.photobucket.com/albums/...ps82c5b530.jpg

And if anyone doubts the teeny tinniness of these resistors:

http://i1177.photobucket.com/albums/...ps711c2599.jpg

All the resistors in on one board and the dip sockets:

http://i1177.photobucket.com/albums/...ps365870b7.jpg

And with the terminals and jumper pins soldered in:

http://i1177.photobucket.com/albums/...ps3e8fdd63.jpg

is there a way to add a potentiometer to this?

Sorry of this is a stupid question, but add a potentiometer to do what?

To manually control the brightness of the LEDs rather than going to the software.

I was confused too but now I see...

With these particular drivers, no. The LDD drivers are controlled with a PWM signal rather than a 0-5 or 0-10V source. If you got a simple IC, like a 555, you could add a potentiometer to that to vary the PWM signal to the drivers. It's not difficult to implement if you want to forgo a controller. There are simpler controllers than the Jarduino if that's what you are looking for. I use a Typhon but will hopefully be experimenting soon with a cool new controller that Spencer at Blue World Victoria is working on.

It's OK now. I just add another screen for individual LED brightness and save it to eeprom.

Glad you got it figured out. I'm out camping and doing this on my phone with my big dumb thumbs :)
Trying not to have to put long posts up, lol.

Can you wire two LDD drivers to one output pin on arduino?

Yup, I've got 4 LDD-1000 running off one pwm pin. Just remember to tie your neutrals together on your input sides.

Took a risk and its worked! The ps that i have is very noisy. Looking for 48v ps. Will this works for the LDD drivers?

http://www.trcelectronics.com/Meanwell/pdf/hlg320h.pdf

That HLG is a driver in itself. Look for the Meanwell SE-350-48.

Got the similar one, but pretty noisy.

Hmmm, weird. Mine's not noisy at all. Have you metered it out to confirm the voltage? It may not be putting out what you think.

I did. It is not a Meanwell's brand.

Can some one help me with wire sizes.

PS 48V 350W 7.3A powering two boards.
Each board has 4 (LDD-H1000)
Each LDD-H1000 4 (10W 11V 1A) LEDs

Need to know the wire sizes between power supply to the boards and from board to the LEDS.

Thanks,
Kevin

I was encouraged to go 18 ga min for psu to board and 20 from LDD's to LED's. There's a couple links back a page or 2 when I had a similar question. Check them out.

Got a wee bit done this morning over my coffee. Drilled one of the heatsinks to within about 1/8" of the back of the 3-up stars since they'll be on the longest and probably run the hottest. Then a bit of thermal epoxy dabbed in the hole and plunked a DS 18B20 sensor down in there. I need to find a way to block off this vane a bit to try and make it not so affected by the fan, thinking of just cutting a tight fitting piece of foam or something and gluing it down in there between the sensor and fan.
I'll try and wire a bit of it tomorrow morning.

http://i1177.photobucket.com/albums/...ps6721a556.jpg