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Old 07-25-2012, 01:16 AM
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Seth81 Seth81 is offline
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Just my two cents here...if you want to be able to dim your LED's the most effecient easiest way is to start off with a dimmable constant current driver. I am an electrical engineer (mostly control systems) and after doing tons of research I used the dimmable constant current drivers from Thomas research products.


And to confirm what others have said, there is no way you can use a voltage regulator to dim LED's being driven off of a constant current driver.
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Old 07-25-2012, 02:12 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Seth81 View Post
Just my two cents here...if you want to be able to dim your LED's the most effecient easiest way is to start off with a dimmable constant current driver. I am an electrical engineer (mostly control systems) and after doing tons of research I used the dimmable constant current drivers from Thomas research products.
Ill throw my vote in with this one. I am not an electrical engineer but I have done enough electrical and electronic courses to know this is the way to go.

The TR drivers are a little more money, but theres a reason for that, they aren't susceptible to inrush current like the Maxwell's are, there dimmers are built in with a few different options, and the sizes you can get them in let you use only two drivers (even for large arrays)

Steve
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Old 07-26-2012, 11:19 AM
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Thanks for the replies fellas. I've done a small LED build for my freshwater nano using dimmable meanwell drivers and was just wondering if there was a cheaper alternative than going with the dimmable version of constant current drivers. I'll check out the Thomas Research drivers as my next project will be using quite a few more LEDs than the previous one and I'd need quite a few meanwells to get the job done.
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