Alright so decided fuck it. Show you what one of the CXAs when connected to the driver looks like. And don't worry, the smoke you see is my joint I sat down to snap a quick picture.
I take it these will be used for flower. Is the led placment tricky, are you going to be using lenses? What is the distance you need to keep the leds at as far as distance between each led placment? They look like the are 2" wide or so. you mentioned three colors when you turned the one on. Is there three color leds?, couldnt you use the warm white ones like they use on the bloom onyx at rapid. Do they make these higher watt warm white led that cover the color spectrem like they use? I was a little confused on that part. Good light making class you got going on here. you will be immortalized here on GK with this thread "light master Skunky!" :thumbsup: :bravo: :coool: :good job: :not-worthy: Ok one last question, how much per light is the cost with everything. Ruff estimated. And how much space can one light do? how big of a hps light can these be compared to? for all the questions, i know you had some price info on the first page. Was not sure with everything added how much it changed.
No lenses and had no luck finding any parabolic reflectors. As for height not sure yet. Will have to get the par meter on it. These are all warm white 3000k. The colors I mentioned were just what was burned into my vision from being blinded by the light. These 6 leds should easily best a 600w hps. Each light hmmm ~$40-45 per LED $10 for heat sink and fan, $13 driver. Then just ~$6 on connectors. Couple feet of 600v 18 gauge wire for source to driver and 50v for driver to led and ~$5 on a 12v converter for the fan. ~$80 or so for 53w. Not 100% on coverage but I'd say max of 2sqft coverage per led for minimal lighting.
looks nice but I am so lost. How much money do you have in this and how hard is it for a tard like myself. I have no clue what most of what you are saying does, but I can follow a plan and schematic You going to put a grow log up once done and link the two? Awesome job so far
How much spacing between each led on the fixture, so its three leds per light? Would they be put in a Triangle formation so many inches apart? I guess i should save my questions till after your done and post pics. :thumbsup: Just trying to picture different ways to set stuff up. when you diy you got some wiggle space to do stuff.
LOL Especially right now, because I've just been typing with a stream and doing as I go. So right now it's real broken but i will edit the original post up top with a nicer more procedural type of how to. It's pretty damn simple. Have you ever wired something like a lamp or redone an extension cord or something similar. If so you can do this. Soldering is another thing but if you want you can use what are called COB holders. Basically you tap and thread a hole or two on the heatsink. It bolts on top of the led and contacts the terminals. You then just use quick connects instead of soldering. Though Some LEDs in general are that way like the citizens and some of the other high quality brands that are difficult to find. I think the Bridgelux VERO 29s are that way too. Those are another really good style of COBs. Seems about the best that are obtainable are the CREE 3070s, 3590s, and Vero 29s. Well I was going to make it two separate units but decided against it so all 6 will be attached to the shelving board. The board is 36" long. i will run 3 on each side. The There will be LEDs placed 6"s from the edges and one in the center along both sides. So about 12" x ~12" spacing. The board is 10"s wide so given the extension out from the heatsinks being attached probably about 1sqft spacing. The light will look like some type of drone/hoverboard thing when it's finished. LOL
I love it! I got a A in lab at Devry, the hands on making our own power supply and leds, resistors, diodes, capacitors, etc on the cob were the best in the first trimesters, Of ourse they were different leds but i get the picture. I use to work in manufacturing from the machine shop all the way from building high dollar electric stuff, testing, material handeling, purchasing, vendor stuff, i did it all but own the place. Its like making a whole new set up to me even though other people have done them but its still way cool! Nothing better than buliding your own stuff, the pride and quality are what you make of it.
Just to throw somthing in the mix to see what you think. Do you think you could of used the leds in this set up with the meanwell power supply? http://www.rapidled.com/onyx-housing-for-diy-projects/
For sure you could but man if you used anything better than XLM/XLM2s you'de have to hang the light pretty high and may not be the best. Would be good for making your own onyx, or if you just want to use a couple COBs in assorted places, though i feel that would be too much heatsink and not enough spread for a good DIY build with higher powered COB LEDs. you could use just about whatever. There are some places like protocase I think the name of the place is that will build custom sized cases. Though if you have the tools would probabyl still be cheaper to make your self out of Al stock and/or sheet.
So got tired of waiting on those stupid Y-splitters and just decided to hardwire the fans. So is the rest. I will update the first thread later. The one thing I didn't show was bunching the wires together with zip-ties. First thing was cut some wire and strip both ends. Then soldered the leads.(Which I suck at soldering....) Just used some cheap $10 60W soldering iron I got at frys electronics. I'm sure you could get something at homedepot or the like. But Might be worth it to find some COB holders and tap the heatsink. Spread out some thermal paste on the heatsink. Then mounted the LED to the heatsink and used 1/4" kapton tape to hold the wires. The wires had slide connectors like the others. Female connector for the POS side, and Male for the Neg side to mate up with those respective leads off the drivers. Mount the heatsinks to the shelving board. Then to wire the fans. Fortunately the rhino supply I bought came with this adapter that had some weird secondary connector on it that I just cut off. Since these are just ran in parallel all I did was add a piece of wire to extend to two of the far end fans. I could match up 4 only, So if I tried to group the 2 fans in the center with the ones on left couldn't reach right and vice versa, so just added a piece of wire for the pos and neg. Now here is where all of the leads tie together including the feed from the supply. Used twist connectors on all of that. Positive leads connected, negative awaiting being connected All together. On
Thanks guys! And yes, most definitely works. Will have to see how it does. Got the PAR meter out and at about 12" is about the same intensity PPFD (photon flux density) as the other lights are at 18-20". Though that's because no lenses and no reflectors. If I go any closer it shoots up quick. No way in hell these could ever get AS close as some of my plants have got with the A51. 3" away A51's register 460smV or about 2300 umol, the CXAs were almost 1200mV or ~6000umol. Would fry some shit. LOL But around the 12" mark you are about 175-190mV or 875-950umol. Temps went up in the tent, but honestly it's all floating at the top. The drivers are the hottest operating part. The LEDs and heatsinks get warm but nothing like the drivers. A remote driver setup in a nice ventialted case similar to ONYX would be badass. You could cram a lot of light in with very minimal heat. but with all 645W going with the 4" fan AC @76F, top of the room over the lights is 84, down at the canopy actually a little cooler than the set temp. No circulating fan or anything.
So now that you got them up and running, do you feel the heat sinks were a good size per led? Other than heat, the drivers are good? do you think you will change anything on the next set up?
