Thursday, March 22, 2012

Netduino - High Power LED drivers

I am currently working on a high power LED driver; this will be used to drive my aquarium lighting.

So a brief overall spec:

The aquarium lighting rig will allow for individual control of the LEDs, this will allow for lighting effects such as cloud cover, seasons, lunar/solar cycles and lightening.

These effects along with the overall lux, colour and contrast will be achieved by having control over the LEDs individually. There will be 3 watt white Cree's, Royal Blues, Red and Greens. This combination will allow for both day and moon light and the reds and greens will allow me to adjust the colour warmth.

In total there will be 30 Leds:

14 x 3W White Cree
10 x 3W Royal Blue
3 x 3W Red
3 x 3W Green

The LEDs will be mounted on a 3mm aluminium sheet, evenly spaced, with various lenses to create an even colour and lux distribution.

The LED drivers will need to be extremely efficient i.e. above 90%, the design Magpie is proposing should achieve over 95% efficiency when used with 6 LEDs in a chain. As I will be using only 1 LED per chain this will be slightly less efficient but I am hopeful that I will still achieve at least 90%.

I will give some more specific details about the drivers and the overall build as I have more information. Currently I have the LEDs and some inductors for building the drivers, so the next steps will be to get the rest of the parts I need and in the mean time I will be testing the TLC5940s which will be providing the PWM control for the LED drivers.

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