Can I hook the battery up to the blue shark without the LEDs hooked up? I want to have my battery cable connect power immediately to the unit, but have a switch on the Vout side of the driver that switches either one LED on or both LEDs on. What kind of current will I draw under no load conditions? I will be running an 11.1v li ion and dual MC-Es.
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Blue shark load protection
- Thread starter mtnbkr1
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I have a demo circuit I used to show the capability of the Shark driving the Ostar and other LEDs. The switch would connect different LEDs to the Shark.
While this may work in theory I had issues with this configuration. There were times going from no load to a full load the converter would get confused and not provide full output.
I would suggest a N+1 approach where at least one LED is being driven all the time and other LEDs are added or subtracted from the Load. Going from an load to an open output is not safe (IMO) since the converter will goto full output voltage regulation in the no load situation and the Blue Shark open voltage protection is now very close to the maximum voltage of the Shark it would take much of an overshoot or spike when this is happening to blow the Shark. I believe the worst case is a large swing to output voltage regulation which would occur on power up with no load or a very small number of LEDs to an open circuit. These would cause the converter to go from a low output voltage to full output voltage around 32V. Since this problem IIRC happened on the regular shark which was set for 23V output voltage regulation it would seem moving the output voltage even higher would make it more suseptable to spiking past the 32V and killing the converter IC.
I don't trust running the converter with no load. I believe others have experienced failures under this condition. This is there for protection only in case a wire falls off to the LED or one of the LEDs blows and opens.
Another approach is to run all the LEDs in series and short out ones in the string to get alternate configurations. Say you have three LEDs. One center and the others offcenter left and offcenter right. The two offcenter might provide flood and could be shorted out to provide drive to only the center one for distance only lighting and another configuration would be the two offcenter and the center shorted out for short field lighting.
I would mount another switch to turn power on/off near the other switch that change the LED configuration.
Just some ideas.
Wayne
While this may work in theory I had issues with this configuration. There were times going from no load to a full load the converter would get confused and not provide full output.
I would suggest a N+1 approach where at least one LED is being driven all the time and other LEDs are added or subtracted from the Load. Going from an load to an open output is not safe (IMO) since the converter will goto full output voltage regulation in the no load situation and the Blue Shark open voltage protection is now very close to the maximum voltage of the Shark it would take much of an overshoot or spike when this is happening to blow the Shark. I believe the worst case is a large swing to output voltage regulation which would occur on power up with no load or a very small number of LEDs to an open circuit. These would cause the converter to go from a low output voltage to full output voltage around 32V. Since this problem IIRC happened on the regular shark which was set for 23V output voltage regulation it would seem moving the output voltage even higher would make it more suseptable to spiking past the 32V and killing the converter IC.
I don't trust running the converter with no load. I believe others have experienced failures under this condition. This is there for protection only in case a wire falls off to the LED or one of the LEDs blows and opens.
Another approach is to run all the LEDs in series and short out ones in the string to get alternate configurations. Say you have three LEDs. One center and the others offcenter left and offcenter right. The two offcenter might provide flood and could be shorted out to provide drive to only the center one for distance only lighting and another configuration would be the two offcenter and the center shorted out for short field lighting.
I would mount another switch to turn power on/off near the other switch that change the LED configuration.
Just some ideas.
Wayne
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