Modernizing LED Color Choices - Discussion

[PIPSTER]

Thanks to everybody for your replies.

I hope my replies are not misunderstood. I want to use a lot of variety of different nm of leds to cover spectrum, and I may use 1-2 whites or try 1 Rebel lime, if it seems desired reflected colors are not showing. I won't just use 450nm, 510nm, and 630nm alone, just that I wanted those to be the spikes to control the white balance with. But I also am curious about using 420nm, 490nm, and 590nm for the spike levels.

I was at the LFS over the weekend, and they had their radions on, I think 30w pro, with just blues and a green and a red for the morning "sunrise", and the water did not look "windexy" to me at all, there was just an overall blueish tint, and the colors on the coral were very much what I liked. I noticed a slight "disco effect", but even if it was magnified, it doesn't bother me. Their fish colors looked fine: Clowns, triggers, tangs, wrasses, etc.
Isn't it ~470nm that is really windex, strong blue color?

I'm pretty sure I don't want to start a DIY LED from scratch, especially when I can get the basics in a complete unit and switch out a few leds for a fraction of the cost. I'm currently leaning towards an OR unit because the cost of two external timers is already more than a cheap ebay unit. Then, I'll just add a few cyan and amber and uv leds, taking out some of the whites, although pictures of peoples corals online with these lights do look pretty good already.

 

[PIPSTER]

Of course, OR bumped their price up, so now I'm back to looking at EG styles...too many of them have little 450nm and too many 470nm.

 

[beolson25]

Ok ... here is a thought ... Create a cheap(relatively) DIY LED project that has a group of all of the LEDS you want to use. Primarily Red, Green, Blue ... maybe some slight variations. Get a single power supply that can power 10ish LEDs and buy some of the LDD Dimmable drivers. Then put those LEDs on a single heatsink and control the dimming of each different color independently. You can then put that fixture over a small 5-10 gallon tank and test your specific corals and livestock for the colors you are looking for. That way you can say(for example) ... I need 20% red, 20% green, and 60% blue(No idea what the real numbers would be).

It is a bit of an investment but I could see it being very useful to the reef community to do these kinds of tests and post pictures at different levels which would give the average person a tool to compare. Not sure if you are the person to do it but I think you could build that LED array for ~$200 or less.

Anyway ... just wanted to add my $.02.

 

[mpierce]

Of course, OR bumped their price up, so now I'm back to looking at EG styles...too many of them have little 450nm and too many 470nm.

The S026 is still $136. Hook it up to a tank controller. No need for built in timers.

 

[PIPSTER]

now all the places I want to buy single leds from are on chinese holiday until the end of the month... *sigh*

 

[PIPSTER]

Can anybody share their experience with LPS as far as which light colors seemed to cause certain LPS to fluoresce? For instance, Hammers seem to give their colors with 450nm, but what about 410nm, or 495nm (cyan)?
What about the following?:

zoas
acans
favia
torches

Anybody's experience in seeing something unique happen with a certain color, or significance in how different a coral looks when you made a color change would be welcome.

 

[jedimasterben]

What colors are you wanting to fluoresce? Most all fluorescent colors are green and will absorb in violet/blue. Everything else is for only some fluorescent colors and non-fluorescent ones. Dana Riddle has an excellent series of articles on Advanced Aquarist about coral pigments.

 

[PIPSTER]

What colors are you wanting to fluoresce? Most all fluorescent colors are green and will absorb in violet/blue. Everything else is for only some fluorescent colors and non-fluorescent ones. Dana Riddle has an excellent series of articles on Advanced Aquarist about coral pigments.

Any and all is the short answer, but I notice blues, greens, cyans, oranges, reds.

I just want to hear people's experiences, if any.

 

[wilkerschnepf]

Popster, thanks for pointing me to this. Seems very interesting and I will follow along.

 

[PIPSTER]

I think I'm starting to understand how color mixing works after using the BML custom spectrum maker and referencing the results on their chart, which looks similar to the one above. The colors that have the biggest distance to the white section need to have more intensity\brightness to reach "white balance". Red and blue, are stronger than light green and yellow. So, I will need more greens in my fixture than I previously thought...in theory. I wonder how this lines up in real life?
So far, I've seen where people have added cyan or orange to b\w setups, but not every level of spectrum together, especially without whites. If anyone has done this, please respond, I want to know your experience(s).

 

[jedimasterben]

530nm green has no place over an aquarium, fresh or salt, use lime instead.

 

[PIPSTER]

JEDIMASTERBEN: 530nm green has no place over an aquarium, fresh or salt, use lime instead.

What's wrong with this picture?

:hmm4:

I think I can skew the white balance towards this bias, without washing out other colors. It won't just be 520nm green, there will be other colors, too. Does the lime led come in a bead style that I can mod a EG style light with?

 

[PIPSTER]

I got my light in...60 bulb chinese something black box. I've removed the lenses, and am waiting on leds i've ordered from all over the world.

It looks like I'll be using:

10 420nm
8 440nm
8 450nm
2 460nm
2 470nm
2 480nm
4 ~495nm
4-5 ~505nm
8 520-530nm
5 585-590nm
2-3 630nm

4 NW


If the amber seems to strong, I'll replace them with either 470nm or CW bulbs.

I've attached a layout plan (subject to change). :celeb1:

 

[dabob79]

Following

 

[jedimasterben]

What's wrong with this picture?

:hmm4:

I think I can skew the white balance towards this bias, without washing out other colors. It won't just be 520nm green, there will be other colors, too. Does the lime led come in a bead style that I can mod a EG style light with?

Not sure what you mean by bead style? It is available as Rebel ES or Luxeon Z.

Also, if you were to go diving right there in that spot and there were corals, they'd look something like this:

Not exactly the shades that most would find appealing.

I got my light in...60 bulb chinese something black box. I've removed the lenses, and am waiting on leds i've ordered from all over the world.

It looks like I'll be using:

10 420nm
8 440nm
8 450nm
2 460nm
2 470nm
2 480nm
4 ~495nm
4-5 ~505nm
8 520-530nm
5 585-590nm
2-3 630nm

4 NW


If the amber seems to strong, I'll replace them with either 470nm or CW bulbs.

I've attached a layout plan (subject to change). :celeb1:

Are you going to drive each color individually so that you can tune to your liking or will it be set up on two drivers like the China black boxes are? Where did you get the LEDs from?

 

[PIPSTER]

I know what you're saying, but I'm cutting out all that yellow...your making my case. I want the general "overall" look to have that bluish green skew under the water that my pic had above the water. I don't want the yellow look under the water your pic has, there is a pic of a tank on my OP that has the tinge i want. I seem to be unable to paste images anymore.


Bead style meaning I can modify the EG style light. It has to have the "wings" to solder to the board. I can't use a chip mounted style like rapid led, without the "wings"...does that make sense? I got them off of ebay, mostly epistar.

the EG light only has two channels :thumbdown but I'm going to have all the blues and violets on one, and the greens, amber, red, and NW on the other. There may be some shuffling, but i'm ok with that.

 

[jedimasterben]

I know what you're saying, but I'm cutting out all that yellow...your making my case. I want the general "overall" look to have that bluish green skew under the water that my pic had above the water. I don't want the yellow look under the water your pic has, there is a pic of a tank on my OP that has the tinge i want. I seem to be unable to paste images anymore.


Bead style meaning I can modify the EG style light. It has to have the "wings" to solder to the board. I can't use a chip mounted style like rapid led, without the "wings"...does that make sense? I got them off of ebay, mostly epistar.

the EG light only has two channels :thumbdown but I'm going to have all the blues and violets on one, and the greens, amber, red, and NW on the other. There may be some shuffling, but i'm ok with that.

Since you're going to be doing some heavy modification anyway, I would just toss out the drivers and the LED board and just mount your LEDs to the heatsink on individual stars. Just throwing a bunch of different colored LEDs on only two channels and hoping for the best is probably not going to get you the result you're looking for since you want something that is pretty particular.

 

[PIPSTER]

I have a theory that light works a lot like sound waves, or rather our human perception of light works like our perception of sound. I happen to be somewhat of an audiophile, who likes music to sound as much as possible closest to their original live sound, both dynamically and without "coloring".

I think the relationship is "inverse", in that to accurately reproduce sound, we want the spectrum of the frequency response of our sound system to be as flat as possible, but want our lighting to be spiked, and not flat at all, to bring out desired bright colors.

With sound, our ears will mask certain details in music if there is a spike in the "EQ" or frequency response from the speakers. This causes us to not hear details on either side close to the spike, because they are masked by it's loudness at that particular frequency. To :deadhorse: :deadhorse1: if we spike the sound system at 440Hz, we will miss out on fine details at 400-500Hz because all we are hearing is 440Hz ("A"). This is especially true on higher frequencies where lots of people turn up the treble. We can use an equalizer with a calibrated microphone and pink noise to flatten the response coming out of the speakers to reveal the details we want...I won't bore you with the details.

With light, the same thing (sorta), I believe, is true. If we have red, green, blue all at certain "equal" levels, or incandescent, or sunlight, we see white light, which masks any of the individual red, green, or blue. We should see most colors reflected at "normal" brightness this way. With reefing, however, I think my goal is to take advantage of the fluorescing colors by not having a "flat response" on the lighting. Halides have spiky responses, like this...

Probably not the spectrum response I want, but to make the point that sunlight type of light is going to block our eyes from the fluorescent colors we (I) want, with it's flatter, broader spectrum.

So, to conclude :deadhorse1: I want spikes in the right places, and not yellow. I think I can have best of both worlds to an extent because I'm not as interested in certain reflected colors.

Who thinks this makes any sense?

 

[PIPSTER]

:dance:
Well, I got my lights in over the weekend and went to work soldering away. Some of the leds came mounted on chips, and I had to get them off...some were easily de-soldered, others had adhesive and were akin to pulling teeth. I finally used a paring knife jammed between the led and the star and tapped it with a hammer on it's side gently to pop it off. :hammer:

So, I followed my plan as posted in the prior pic.

Blue Channel:
10 420nm
8 440nm
8 450nm
2 460nm
2 470nm

"White" Channel:
2 480nm
4 ~495nm
5 ~505nm
8 520-530nm
5 585-590nm
2 630nm
4 NW...this was my compromise for reflected non-fluorescent colors.

This thing looks nothing short of awesome at first light! :spin2:
With just the "white" channel on, it is basically white with a bluish-green undertone, no red or orange feel at all. The blue channel overpowers the White to a slight blue-ish tinge when both channels are at the same level. With blues at lowest setting, (10% ?) and white at 100%, the rendition is almost neutral white with a very slight blue-green slant, very close to my wishes. I like the white channel only look, with it's stronger green rendition. Blues by themselves is a very dark blue. The violets, 410nm-420nm, are interesting in that, when I look at a reflection of their bulbs off the bottom of the glass, they appear actually white-ish. I know my eyes won't be able to pick up much of their actual color, since they are nearly UV, but seeing the dull white part was unexpected. I will work on trying to upload pics. I have to still setup the tank, and put in water, so I know that will make a difference on my perception.
If I have to, I will use a diffuser panel, but I want to try it first without that. I won't have any lenses, just bare bulbs with there 120* "lens" that's part of the bulb.

Now I have to wait on setting up the tank, putting in water, etc...to decide on light height and mounting it.

 

[peterj66]

So, how is it working out for you? Been thinking along similar lines, but i´m having trouble deciding on a good color mix.