DIY LEDs with Radion Pro G2 pucks?

[black74]

Im hoping you can wire this up to use your own controller. I got the bluefish controller. I may just order 1 just to see if it wirks and if so, order a 2nd kit. I only need 2 anyways. If it works with my controller than yes.. Its a great deal for what you get.. Although my preference is 2xG3 pro kits..:bounce2:

QUOTE=zachts;23118801]I looked up a little and it just links you to thier controller page which is all wirelsess technollogy now so probably you must purchase thier controller to make it work using the driver boards and main board supplied. or determine how to hack into thier drivers for your own control signals (probably not hard to do, but never seen the guts of one up close)

However the kit would give you the cables and connectors and no reason that you couldn't simply decide to not use the electronics and just use the connectors to hook up some LDD's and your own controller.

Individual pucks were selling on the AI site for $75 and I don't think that included the lense or any of the hardware, so the kit is a good deal even if you don't want to use thier boards or hardware in the end............[/QUOTE]

 

[black74]

Will do...found some dude on youtube do a video on this kit. Pretty straight foward and simple. No reason i couldnt wire this up to my bluefish controller. May pull the trigger on one of these soon. Fingers crossed... Will post if it works.

No one that I know of on this thread. If it only requires a controller then it shouldn't be too hard to make it work unless it is using a proprietary way to talk to all the channels on their board (very likely). Dig into it and let us know. Krazie :jester:

 

[zachts]

Will do...found some dude on youtube do a video on this kit. Pretty straight foward and simple. No reason i couldnt wire this up to my bluefish controller. May pull the trigger on one of these soon. Fingers crossed... Will post if it works.

How bout a link to that video?
Thanks.

 

[black74]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDsn98QyWFY

How bout a link to that video?
Thanks.

 

[Krazie4Acans]

If what you really want is the Radion G3 pro's then why not just get those in the upgrade kit and save $100 over the AI Hydra52 kits? Then hook them to your controller with an LDD board and you will have everything you want. :eek1:

Krazie:jester:

 

[Krazie4Acans]

I'm sure the pin headers that the motherboard presses down onto is just a straight through to the LEDs. You should be able to figure out which pin is for which color and wire it to an LDD dimmer board. Seams fairly straight forward. from what I see. Granted I don't have one sitting in front of me to verify. Krazie[)]

 

[cdial]

Do you guys notice much extra heat from PWM dimming vs Current dimming. I know PWM is not nearly as efficient. Is the color shift from current dimming drastic enought to go to PWM? Was just curious which way to go. I know we strive to have the right spectrum and dimming by PWM keeps the spectrum the same. Just way less efficient. I have read that PWM reduces heat. But doing the math, reducing current leads to less energy used at lower forward voltages when dimmed with current reduction vs PWM. Thanks for any info. This is my first build.

 

[black74]

Good point...i thought about that too. The reason im considering this is due to the fact that the AI kit includes the board, powers supply, plastic housing, and accessories. Not just the LEDS. With the G3 kit..you still need to get power supply, drivers, and d@%! around with the wiring harness. Frankly too me its not worth the hassle of waiting/dealing with the harness.

If what you really want is the Radion G3 pro's then why not just get those in the upgrade kit and save $100 over the AI Hydra52 kits? Then hook them to your controller with an LDD board and you will have everything you want. :eek1:

Krazie:jester:

 

[Krazie4Acans]

Do you guys notice much extra heat from PWM dimming vs Current dimming. I know PWM is not nearly as efficient. Is the color shift from current dimming drastic enought to go to PWM? Was just curious which way to go. I know we strive to have the right spectrum and dimming by PWM keeps the spectrum the same. Just way less efficient. I have read that PWM reduces heat. But doing the math, reducing current leads to less energy used at lower forward voltages when dimmed with current reduction vs PWM. Thanks for any info. This is my first build.

There should really be no difference in temperature between Analog and PWM dimming. Analog may reduce current and forward voltage but it requires the brightness to be slightly higher in order to offset those lower values and still produce the same amount of light. Using the LEDs in these lower current, lower forward voltage areas of the characteristic curve actually makes the LED put off more heat at the junction due to saturation levels not being met.

PWM will allow you to run the LEDs at a slightly lower value and still produce the same light output.

From my experience, we are talking about only a couple of degrees difference.So essentially they should be nearly identical. You could use lower amperage LDD's and reduce heat more but I personally don't think that is a problem. Krazie:jester:

 

[Krazie4Acans]

Good point...i thought about that too. The reason im considering this is due to the fact that the AI kit includes the board, powers supply, plastic housing, and accessories. Not just the LEDS. With the G3 kit..you still need to get power supply, drivers, and d@%! around with the wiring harness. Frankly too me its not worth the hassle of waiting/dealing with the harness.

The AI kit does not come with a heatsync so you'll have to find on that fits the plastic housing. If you use their board and power supply then you'll have to use their controller (that you have to buy as well) unless you take the time to d@%! around and find the input to connect up a different PWM control source into the AI driver board. The harness really wasn't that hard and it only took a couple of days to get the parts.

If you decide to got the AI route you should start a new thread and document what you end up doing. Krazie :jester:

 

[cdial]

Thank you Krazie,
There's so much info out there and I've been reading through it all. I always thought PWM was superior because you have more steps of control. Never thought to do the math of which was more efficient at dimmed levels. It seems the lower the led is dimmed the bigger the gap there is in efficiency by the articles I've read. I was thinking maybe I should run a lower current LDD so I'm not dimming super low as often. Food for thought. Do you all run the led's close to their max. I've seen some say they are shooting for the max and others say to back it down. I am curious how hard ecotech is driving these pucks. I want to get all the light I can but I don't want to replace them in a year either. Thanks again for helping me out there. I ordered some 7UP LDD boards. I will have to get one of the krimpers. Trying to find a 6 inch wide heatsink. I'm going to gut my coralife halide fixture and mount the heatsinks where the halides were. Add a couple fans.

 

[Krazie4Acans]

I match my LDD amperage to the rating of the LEDs it's driving but I find I rarely run them at 100% brightness (maybe the royal blue). Honestly I have a couple of fixtures that I built with G1 pucks a year and half ago and I'm running them at max current and they run at 100% on all channels. They have been running that way the whole time. I do have them on an 18" heatsync with dual fans. So I think as long as you are able to keep them from getting really warm then they will last just fine. Krazie :jester:

 

[crn005]

Correct. With the connector on the puck on the right side and LED's facing up the bottom pin is pin 1.

Yeah I actually noticed that after I made the post. I should get my nose out of the computer every now and then and look at the actual product! Anyway, I ordered all my drivers, power supply, etc on Thursday evening. It won't be here until Thursday this week....I'm not happy about the week wait!!! In the mean time, I am making my harness though. At least I have all of those supplies ready to go.

 

[black74]

Can someone tell me what power supply to get to run 3 - G3 non-pro sets? Will 2 x Meanwell CLG-150-36A PSU's do it? 1 for 2 set and one for the other set? I will run them on a 6 up board with 4x700H and 2x1000h LDD drivers.

 

[Krazie4Acans]

Can someone tell me what power supply to get to run 3 - G3 non-pro sets? Will 2 x Meanwell CLG-150-36A PSU's do it? 1 for 2 set and one for the other set? I will run them on a 6 up board with 4x700H and 2x1000h LDD drivers.

Why not get 3 x 6-up LDD boards and 3 x 250 watt power supplies? you can run them all connected to the same PWM controller or separate them to have more control over each section of the tank (and weather effects)?

2 X Meanwell CLG-150-36A's will not run 6 x G3 pucks. Each puck is rated at 65Watts so two together would be 130Watts per set. A 150 Watt supply is just barely enough overhead for that one set. No way you could run two sets off of one power supply. You also can't add multiple power supplies to the same LDD board unless you are running the board that powers 3 channels off each supply and they are separated at the connections. O2 had two different board configurations and one was separate the other was not.

I would recommend separate boards and power supplies for eat set of pucks just to be redundant in case some thing fails with the lights. Then it won't take down all of your lights while you get parts. Krazie :jester:

 

[black74]

Good point....can you recommend a PSU to run each set of G3 non-pros?


QUOTE=Krazie4Acans;23124769]Why not get 3 x 6-up LDD boards and 3 x 250 watt power supplies? you can run them all connected to the same PWM controller or separate them to have more control over each section of the tank (and weather effects)?

2 X Meanwell CLG-150-36A's will not run 6 x G3 pucks. Each puck is rated at 65Watts so two together would be 130Watts per set. A 150 Watt supply is just barely enough overhead for that one set. No way you could run two sets off of one power supply. You also can't add multiple power supplies to the same LDD board unless you are running the board that powers 3 channels off each supply and they are separated at the connections. O2 had two different board configurations and one was separate the other was not.

I would recommend separate boards and power supplies for eat set of pucks just to be redundant in case some thing fails with the lights. Then it won't take down all of your lights while you get parts. Krazie :jester:[/QUOTE]

 

[crn005]

Word to the wise, don't use solid wire for this or any other project. They snap like no ones business once plugged in. Use stranded wire. Less learned. Anyway, I should get all of my power gear in tomorrow. I finished the harness tonight. Here it is:

My plans for what wires go where.

 

[black74]

Is anyone interested in a wire harness like the one in post#386? I just sourced a couple of Chinese vendors and im waiting for pricing. Depending on need, im thinking of ordering 20-30 harnesses. PM me if your interested.

 

[cdial]

I found some nice 7 Up boards on ebay from a guy in Ohio. I did find the kit online as well but these were put together already. It accepts the LDD or LDL with the quick connect slots to change out drivers. It also has dip switches to set different channels as slaves so you can have 2 channels running off the same PWM in. The PWM also has a nice connection so you can piggy back more boards together. I got 4 of them. My mom runs the purchasing department for a major electronics company in the US. I gave her the part number on the molex connectors and they use them. She has 555 different Molex connectors in her inventory lol. She talked to a vendor and they sent her some. I also talked to a friend that works there in their engineering department. He lives a few miles from me and said he would help me build the harness' if I wanted to. I may just get some on here if some get made up.

I pre ordered Rapid's new heatsink enclosures. After going back and forth and looking at a lot of different setups these looked the cleanest. Should be out in a few days. Cant wait to get started. I already had two of rapids 48" X 1" accent heatsinks that I was going to retro into my existing hood. I think I will get some of the smaller 18" X 1" accent heatsinks from Rapid and make a rack to hang the pucks and outer heatsinks together. Crappy part is I work away from home and I've been out for 45 days. Should be back home within a week to see the parts. I've had the jarduino running for a while. Just been waiting to get the lights built. I'll use it for a while but some of the new controllers that are out look really nice.

 

[Krazie4Acans]

Make sure you don't hang those heatsync's too close to the water. They don't have a splash guard and any moisture or splashes will corrode the exposed solder pads on the LED's and eventually result in the leads coming loose from their solder pads. If you are using the TIR lenses than that will help and protect the LEDs from that. Krazie :jester: