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Old 01-24-2012, 03:22 PM
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mike31154 mike31154 is offline
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A little more progress on the project since the 12VDC 240Watt power supply & 10 additional heatsinks finally arrived yesterday. Still waiting for 10 10Watt 10,000K LED chips. Chuckle, all those 10s make my eyes go buggy.

Power Supply. Adjustable from 10.07 to 13.58 VDC with the variable resistor. I will probably set it at close to 12 VDC & use separate variable resistors or drivers on each output line to control current & brightness of LEDs. With a potentiometer on each output line, I'll be able to control 3 colours of LEDs individually. This is pretty much mandatory, since different colours of these LED arrays tend to have slightly different maximum voltages, anywhere from 9 to 12. For example, the Royal Blues' rated forward voltage is 9-10 volts, so running them at 12 will sure as hell make them brighter, but I reckon they wouldn't last too long.



I've now mounted 6 heatsinks on to the first rail with 3 each of the cool white 6,000-7,000K LEDs & 452-455NM Royal Blues. The LED chips are only held on with heatsink compound at the moment. I'll see how secure that is once the compound cures & may leave it at that instead of securing additionally with screws. The tiny screws required are hard to source.



Original idea was 3 of these rails, but having assembled the one, I think I may reconfigure to have 2 rails only, but with 8 LEDs per rail vice 6. My 77 gal is just under 16 inches inside dimension front to back & 3 rails would be too much hardware with these 10 Watt arrays.

Now it's wait for the remaining LEDs, shop for additional hardware - potentiometers & wiring for hookup. Have a couple more heatsinks on hand, so I can get to work building the second rail.
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DIY 10 watt multi-chip LED build http://www.canreef.com/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=82206

Last edited by mike31154; 01-24-2012 at 03:24 PM.
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