LEDsDoIt

Projects
Participants	Ultratux
Skills	standing on ladders, wiring shit up, cooling, the Art of Lighting
Status	Finished
Niche	Other
Purpose	Infrastructure

Current status

I'm now rolling out a range of these leds glued to the metal ceiling tiles in front of the kitchen area. They're powered by a PC PSU. I also eventually found a nice way to shield the light a bit to help prevent blinding onlookers: rings sawed from 'alu rookgasafvoer dikwandig 80mm' seems to work fine and look okay.

Future plans

This same configuration can be rolled out over other areas of the East space. Suggestions are welcome. Keep in mind that some other objects may be in the way (notably, fluorescent light fixtures).

Helping / Pledge / Economics

Help with this project is very welcome, both in [wo]manpower and in economics (A few loose euros to help cover the cost of the parts)...
Costs so far: ~16 euro for the 100cm rookgasafvoer, ~22 euro for the led chips, and I need to buy fresh binary glue ( ~10 euro)
The pledge is here

Old History...

I surfed around on banggood when I found these really cheap, really powerful LED chips (bare chip/module). Amongst many models up to 100W(!) was a nice cheap 10W module that seemingly doesn't require a constant-current source, blurts out 900 lumen, and costs 71 cent apiece. It requires a PSU and some form of heatsink obviously. Since techinc has an abundance of both and isn't afraid to tinker or have weird-looking contraptions I made the plan to buy these to increase or enhance the lights over our solder tables while freeing up the lights that are there for other, less-well lit corners (some of them have broken already, too).

So I've ordered a handful of warm-white 10W LED modules and half a handful of cool white 10W LED modules. (the solder work benefits by having a mix of warm white and cool white I think). When they get delivered (end October I guess) we'll need to fix them up with heatsinks and a PSU and hang them up.

I have bought a few extra warm white ones, perhaps for over the kitchen area, or elsewhere. The powerbar still has lots of unused channels, so... ;-)

Update: LEDs have arrived. I have done some tests on them with them a LAB powersupply today and proceeded to glue 12 of them to various old heatsinks. Now we have to wait until the (thermally conductive) glue cures. I dunno... maybe 24 hours... maybe a week or more...

Today I mounted 7 of the LEDs over the solder tables. The light isn't focussed at all, it's very ambient. So partly nice, partly bad for the soldering work. I also mounted a metal ceiling tile I prepared with one LED over the sofa area. We need to test 1) whether the ceiling tile is sufficient as heatsink. 2) whether the light is agreable and not too much blinding.

Pics of what it looks like currently can be seen here and here

Seeing the lights in action today, how they perform, the light color they have, the potential to spread them out over either ceiling tiles or aluminum beams made me decide to place a followup order of 32 pcs, all warmwhite, A mix of coolwhite and warmwhite isn't necessary, as it turns out the warmwhite isn;t overly yellow and fairly pleasant, so all warmwhite seems to be just fine. The order of 32 LEDs cost me €14,44. The previous order of LEDs cost me €2.36 + €4.72 (5x coolwhite 10x warmwhite). 32 LEDs should be enough to start a pattern on a number of ceiling tiles, should that prove feasible. And otherwise we have a large number of spares. ;-)

Instead of heat sink blocks or ceiling tiles I figured the aluminum beams in the west space ceiling may provide enough mass to act as heat sink themselves. This needs investigating; care should be taken though that it won't heat so much as to endanger 230V wiring tied to those beams.