46" DIY LED Build Thread

moonlightdriver said:
Where did you buy your stuff from? rapid led?
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Some from rapidLED, others elsewhere. I found rapidLED to be extremely helpful, but not necessarily extremely knowledgeable with modifying their initial design.

There's a group buy of lesser powered LEDs going on right now, so I'm wondering if there are similar manufacturers elsewhere that have the better LEDs. 60% of the cost is the LEDs. The other stuff is fairly cheap.

On a side note I'd highly recommend this soldering iron. Aoyue Digital Soldering Station 937+ (AO937+)
 
moonlightdriver said:
Where did you buy your stuff from? rapid led?
Click to expand...

Also, if you do go with RapidLED, DO NOT go with their dimming circuit. They recommend having 3 10k ohm resisters. The first trims off the 2 volts to make the dimming circuit a "regulated" 10v. This is far from the truth. It's a crappy way to do it.

You can find 10v regulated power supplies (make sure they say REGULATED). RapidLED even has them on their site now.
 
titoav15 said:
The light brings out some awesome colors of your sps, I can only imagine what it's like in person!
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My house isn't huge (small cap cod in the city near irondequoit/winton rd), but would love to have a day to have a bunch of people over. So let me know who's interested.

Weekends work best for me. Oh and I should mention I have a big dog (great dane). Super friendly and won't jump, but slobbers a bit. :D

IMG_0117.JPG
 
How is the front to back spread with the LEDs? They appearing to be spaced 2"? Your fixture is how many inches wide?
 
5380 said:
How is the front to back spread with the LEDs? They appearing to be spaced 2"? Your fixture is how many inches wide?
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If I were going wider than a 75g (18"), I'd add an extra row. But as far as coverage for the 75g goes, plenty. I'm still getting coraline growth on the back glass and I have the fixture off-center towards the front.
 
was wondering how the heat is transfer from the led die thru the star substrate, do you have a pic of the backside?
 
solRNY said:
was wondering how the heat is transfer from the led die thru the star substrate, do you have a pic of the backside?
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Unfortunately I don't have a pic of the backside and didn't order any extra in this batch. There is an aluminum heatsink built into the star the LED is mounted to. You then apply thermal grease and attach it to the larger aluminum heatsink.

It's identical to how computer chips (CPU/GPU) are cooled.
 
thanks for the pic... thinking about mounting some LEDs real close together without the star substrate.... u got me wanting to start a diy led project too :)
 
5380 said:
Me too, I wonder how hard it would be to convert my Current 1x250 4x24w to LED+4x24w.
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Figure out the size of the reflector in the MH. once you have that, you can figure out what size heatstink you can squeeze in there. It'll generate way less heat than the MH so you'll be ok with the built in cooling. Once you have the heatsink size you can determine how many LEDs you can mount to it. And at that point can figure out what kind of power you'll need.
 
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