Meanwell LDD driver: for those who want to dim to 0 using Arduino

bhazard451 said:
I have a central location shelf in the middle of my fixture where the drivers will be located. They are so small, that I will just use 3M double sided mounting tape to hold it down. The driver will be on its side with the wires pointing to the back or sides of the fixture, unless I use a proto board.
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Proto board... what a good idea. Why didn't I think of that? I now have 7 drivers ordered!
 
mattclark82 said:
Looking at the spec sheet, and being a bit rusty from High School electronic tech, I see a pin for PWM dimming input, but my ELN has a PWM+ and PWM- hooked into my controller. With the LDD in use, not aure what to do with my other PWM lead from the controller.
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PWM- goes to Vin- , PWM+ goes to the DIM pin. This is common design practice not to create extra solder points.
 
I cannot get over how small these drivers are. It would take about 12 of them to equal the size of 1 ELN-60-48D.

My 120 gallon freshwater gets drilled and converted to saltwater this weekend, and once it is up and running, I will start building my led fixture.
 
bhazard451 said:
I cannot get over how small these drivers are. It would take about 12 of them to equal the size of 1 ELN-60-48D.

My 120 gallon freshwater gets drilled and converted to saltwater this weekend, and once it is up and running, I will start building my led fixture.
Click to expand...

When I opened my BIG box with all of the bubble wrap I found a few packages wrapped in foam up and some long rectangular clear tubes. First thought, they shipped me the wrong stuff. Opened the tubes up and out slides 10 of these LDD's in each tube. They are SOOOOO small.

Glad I got some already wired too because I may need a magnifying glass and someone with smaller fingers to add wires to the others :lmao:
 
Drivers are not that big...it's just a chip, this one just has the extra resistors and caps that are needed. It's a good find, but if you're building stuff yourself it's still cheaper to get something like a CAT4101 and build the circuit yourself. This is a great find though and I'm sure I'll use them at some point.
 
Thanks for posting this last month, as I now have a use for these.

Just an FYI, Mouser will only price match with certain vendors: Digikey, Allied, and Newark. However, I just spoke to them on the phone and they did offer to drop the pricing to one price tier lower. They didn't have to do that, so I thought it was awfully nice. I always order Mouser anyways, they have never done me wrong and I get UPS ground next day from them.

Unfortunately they don't have the exact ones I want, but who drives LEDs at 100% anyways? 600mA is perfect for my application though so I won't complain.
 
dwolson2 said:
Is there any way to utilize the LDD drivers with a 0-10v signal from an apex?
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I have been wondering about this too. In me research I found Steve's Led Aquarium Controller Interface Harness. It is supposed to be able to convert 0-10v signals like that from the apex to pwm signals. One harness is supposed to be able to do up to four different channels. I have not tried it yet though and so have no idea if it works. I also saw when I was researching that you can have different pwm voltages, so I don't know if this harness is compatible with the LDD drivers. I read in the harness spec that it uses a 5v power source so I assume it outputs in that voltage. I am very new to pwm so don't know too much about it.
 
Do these drivers get very hot when in use? I mean, should they be in open air or may be placed in an enclosed area?
 
chema said:
Do these drivers get very hot when in use? I mean, should they be in open air or may be placed in an enclosed area?
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I'll let you know by tomorrow. I have some coming in today so I can retrofit a coralife t5 fixture. I plan on enclosing them. All drivers will get hot to some degree, so we'll see how manageable it is. You could always check the data sheet to see if it says anything about cooling.
 
rrasco said:
Looking at the data sheet, it says it is cooled by free air convection and has a max case operating temperature of 100*C, which is 212*F. If your enclosure gets that hot, you have other problems.

http://www.meanwell.com/search/LDD-L/default.htm
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Mine are going into a project box on top of the heatsink/fixture.

I also got my jarduino from the video up and running last night. The new slider bars for the leds are sweet, and resemble Ecotech's bars. I cant wait to put it all together.
 
These things are so small I might not even mount them. If anything, I might use thermal adhesive to stick them to the enclosure. The ones without leads have pins on the bottom b/c they are meant to be mounted to a PCB, so still trying to figure out what I'm going to do. Guess I could get a proto board, but then I still have to mount that.
 
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