Minimalistic multichip DIY LED build

[007Bond]

Yes Mr Wilson I seen the previous pic.. close ups of your chip. I didn't know if you had more than one chip in each fixture of the current pics you posted. Those are some really cool one.. chip fixtures.

 

[Sonny n Colleen]

...It's also a good idea to use slightly different multichips in each respective fixture or at least set/dim them differently. If the light is completely homogenous, it looks clinical. This is a limitation of T5 (too uniform), while metal halide gives you the option of mixing colour temperatures in a fixture...Surface movement is a major contributor to shimmer that is often overlooked. If you don't like the shimmer pattern you are getting, adjust your surface agitation accordingly. Wave makers are a good way of increasing a natural, random look.

I plan on individually driving each channel of the 3 chips so I can try and create the occasional/rolling partially cloudy look by varying intensities between the chips and their channels.

 

[noplay180]

Nice Mr.Wilson where could I find that multi chip

Sent from my SPH-L710 using Tapatalk 2

 

[jt41time]

I tried to blue out my 50w white with 6 3w RB leds. Didn't go too good. It was close. But not enough. I just glued two more to the plate. We will see. Also I have a good amount of diff optics. I'm at 12000k right now I think.
6 Cree xr-e, 2 bridgelux.

 

[TropTrea]

I tried to blue out my 50w white with 6 3w RB leds. Didn't go too good. It was close. But not enough. I just glued two more to the plate. We will see. Also I have a good amount of diff optics. I'm at 12000k right now I think.
6 Cree xr-e, 2 bridgelux.

If your running the 3 Watt LED's at a true 3 watts the ratio you had was
50 Watts White to 18 Watts Blue. with your two added Blues it will be 50 watts white to 24 watts Blue. The thing is that the Royal blue color prooduced is not as sensattive to the eye as some of the other colors produced in the White chip the eye is primarly sensative to green light, secondary to red light, and finaly blue light. So usualy people have equal to more wattage of blue light than they have white light.

For myself I prefer something around the range of 2.5 to 3.5 Watts of blue light for every watt of 5,000K White light. If your using a higher K white source then less blue is needed but even people using the so called 20,000K whites usualy have an equal amount of Blue light in terms of wattage.

 

[TropTrea]

Thanks for the reply Mr. Wilson. I may just go ahead and build a 3w led set up and be done with it...Thanks again

If your going with 3 Watt LED;'s I strongly suggest you go with the Cree XP chips. I prefer the neutral whites in a ratio of 1 watt white to 2.5 to 3.5 watts blue. There is lot of personal preference here on the ratio but with neutral whites do take mopre blue leds to notice the blue effect compared to higher K leds that are already rich in the blues.

As I advise most people go with the minimum number of whites and blues run it for about 2 weeks than fine tune it to you eye. With this in mind I would initialy recomend you ran with 12 Neutral Whites, 12 Blues, and 30 Royal Blues. Then after you get used to the color and brightness you can decide to either add 6 more neutral whites or 6 more of one of the Blue chips.

I would run these on 4 seperate drivers.
Driver 1 would be all Royal Blue for a deep blue pre dawn to post dusk effect.
Driver 2 would be the Blues and 4 of the White chips to geive a brighter dawn to dusk appearance.
Then Driver 3 and 4 would be the rest of your chips for the brighter mid day setting.

With your tank being only 18" wide I would use only 3 1"X 2" channels spaced about 1/2 apart. You could run up to 23 LED's on each channel but I would only run 20.

 

[mr.wilson]

I tried to blue out my 50w white with 6 3w RB leds. Didn't go too good. It was close. But not enough. I just glued two more to the plate. We will see. Also I have a good amount of diff optics. I'm at 12000k right now I think.
6 Cree xr-e, 2 bridgelux.

It will take at least 6 more 3w chips to get to 14k. blue or royal blue light is easily overpowered by white light.

3w bandages aren't an efficient solution. The cost effective solution is to change the 50w chip or add a second 50w chip that is royal blue.

At one point in time, I tried using a ring of 3w chips around the multi chip, but it wasn't practical or cost effective.

 

[jt41time]

It will take at least 6 more 3w chips to get to 14k. blue or royal blue light is easily overpowered by white light.

3w bandages aren't an efficient solution. The cost effective solution is to change the 50w chip or add a second 50w chip that is royal blue.

At one point in time, I tried using a ring of 3w chips around the multi chip, but it wasn't practical or cost effective.

I just did the math. If I had 8 leds per sink. 3 sinks. Plus drivers.... not very good. And the whole point of this was simplicity and cheap. I just bought a new multi chip. 20 blues and 30 whites. We will see. I was hoping to find a 30 blue and 20 white that was 60$. But no dice. 27$ for this one. Will be here in a couple weeks.

I was fitting lenses on the lil leds and hot glued them. When I number the fixture wiring it, the lenses came off. With the outer big lenses came the internal main led lens. Yay. Fragged about 4 leds..... done.......I'm officially over the multi 3w leds projects for a while.

I might be playing with some rgb multi chips soon though. Kinda interesting......

 

[mr.wilson]

I just did the math. If I had 8 leds per sink. 3 sinks. Plus drivers.... not very good. And the whole point of this was simplicity and cheap. I just bought a new multi chip. 20 blues and 30 whites. We will see. I was hoping to find a 30 blue and 20 white that was 60$. But no dice. 27$ for this one. Will be here in a couple weeks.

I was fitting lenses on the lil leds and hot glued them. When I number the fixture wiring it, the lenses came off. With the outer big lenses came the internal main led lens. Yay. Fragged about 4 leds..... done.......I'm officially over the multi 3w leds projects for a while.

I might be playing with some rgb multi chips soon though. Kinda interesting......

This is what DIY is all about, trial and error, with emphasis on the latter

I spent a fortune building a multichip fixture only to find out Zalman discontinued the CPU cooler I modelled it around shortly after I bought it. Back to the drawing board. Lesson learned: don't rely on any specific design that is not controlled directly by you. Keep everything modular.

 

[bowfront90]

mr. wilson, I have a 72 in (length) x 36 in (width) x 24 in (height) with SPS, LPS, clams, etc. What multichip would you recommend, optics, and how many?

 

[Punkalflufen]

bowfront90.

Do you want 10, 20, 50 100w chips?

If I was designing a multi chip build for you I would probably use something like this.

10-12x 1000k 20w
5-6x 453 20w
5-6x 445 20w

3-5x 430 20w or 5-10 430 10w
3-5x 420 20w or 5-10 420 10w
1-2x 405 20w or 5 405 10w

This is just what I would do and only a quick guess and slight increase on my build a 5x2x2.5

 

[Punkalflufen]

These are photos of one of my 50w 1000k EPISTAR LED and a string of 5x 20w EPISTAR 453's. They are only over a 4ft tank I have cycling a little live rock...
My main system is not quite ready yet and I am not controlling them with the Profilux at the mometn just pots...

Sorry they are not great quality photos they are from my phone

10000K on its own.

10000K with 453s dimmed down.

10000K with 453s.

453s with the 10000k dimmed down.

453s on there own.

And finally a sting of 2x 405, 2x 420 and 1x 430 (Taken on my Cannon G12 its was flat for the photos)

 

[firefightered66]

Thanks Lassef, I'll look into this. what abot just using 2-3 multichips to get rid of my MH and use my 4x t5s (2 on each side)?

If you want to go with multichip - you can see one solution with 10 watts LED (48" tall) (In Swedish - but the pictures explain a lot) here. In this thread (also in Swedish) the pictures can give some inspirations. In your case I probably had use the second solution with to tubes (50 mm * 20 mm) bolt together and a 80 mm fan in the midle (or two). In the front: take 4 white, 14 - 16 000K (20 Watts). At the back: take 5 blue - 455-445 - 420 - 445 - 455.

Place them in a zigzag pattern. ( -_-_-_-_-) Connect whites in one daisy chain, the blues in another. Try with no lenses - with lenses white - 90 degrees. Blues - a mix.
Drivers - White: LPF-90D-48 -> app 80 W. Blue: LPF-90D-54 -> 90 W. The last driver will be at the edge of what it can manage. I think it will work with 5 pcs of 20 watt in a daisy chain at 1.67 A cause the total FV should be around 52.5 V at this current. But you have to try. You can dim these drivers with pot, 1-10V or PWM

Splash guard and place them rather close to the surface.

This is just a suggestion. Trop Trea´s solution will also work.

Sincerely Lasse

 

[dwolson2]

Been here a while, but I am sure things have changed.
Here is the plan:

5w LED's with 2 50W on the ends.

The outside black boxes are heatsinks. 2- 6X9 and 1-6X20 from rapid LED

The question is can I still use the Mean Well ELN-60-48D dimmable driver for the 50W leds? I know it was one driver per each LED on the 50w.

Also, what is the difference between these two:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/1PC-50W-Coo...566?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item5d34bac3be

http://www.ebay.com/itm/1Pcs-50W-Co...719?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item3a796cec6f

obviously one is more expensive than the other. I am looking for around a 20K look. They appear to be nearly the same LED.

Should what I have presented work? I plan to have fans(5) cooling the heat sink.

Thanks!

edit:
Oh and the triple puck kits are the triple pucks from rapid led, I bought a kit from them already.

 

[ReefUrchin]

Does anyone know what kind of spread a 100w LED multi-chip has 24" from the surface with no optics? Is it narrow enough to even measure, lol?

 

[kuya_cesar]

And finally a sting of 2x 405, 2x 420 and 1x 430 (Taken on my Cannon G12 its was flat for the photos)

What do you mean string of 405, 420 and 430. So these are multichips or linear strips like the ones on ebay. And where did you bought them from?

 

[hillscp]

Does anyone know what kind of spread a 100w LED multi-chip has 24" from the surface with no optics? Is it narrow enough to even measure, lol?

The 100W multi chips from my vendor all have a 120 degree spread.

With a little trig you can figure it out. (I had to shake off 40 years of inactivity :spin1: )

it is:

TAN A = a/b

where A is the angle (.5 x 120 = 60), a is 1/2 the spread and b is the height (24"). We are solving for a.

TAN 60 X 24 = 41.5 (half the spread) Spread = 83"

Wow that was fun! Now I just need one of the engineers to check my work.

 

[dwolson2]

Btw, this will be on a 4'x2'dx28"h

Been here a while, but I am sure things have changed.
Here is the plan:

5w LED's with 2 50W on the ends.

The outside black boxes are heatsinks. 2- 6X9 and 1-6X20 from rapid LED

The question is can I still use the Mean Well ELN-60-48D dimmable driver for the 50W leds? I know it was one driver per each LED on the 50w.

Also, what is the difference between these two:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/1PC-50W-Coo...566?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item5d34bac3be

http://www.ebay.com/itm/1Pcs-50W-Co...719?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item3a796cec6f

obviously one is more expensive than the other. I am looking for around a 20K look. They appear to be nearly the same LED.

Should what I have presented work? I plan to have fans(5) cooling the heat sink.

Thanks!

edit:
Oh and the triple puck kits are the triple pucks from rapid led, I bought a kit from them already.

 

[Lassef]

The 100W multi chips from my vendor all have a 120 degree spread.

With a little trig you can figure it out. (I had to shake off 40 years of inactivity :spin1: )

it is:

TAN A = a/b

where A is the angle (.5 x 120 = 60), a is 1/2 the spread and b is the height (24"). We are solving for a.

TAN 60 X 24 = 41.5 (half the spread) Spread = 83"

Wow that was fun! Now I just need one of the engineers to check my work.

And you have the index of refraction of the water to take into account also .........

But wait - I'm working on a solution

Sincerely Lasse

 

[Lassef]

This maybye can help somebody

View attachment ljusbrytning.xls

Sincerely Lasse