newbie wiring questions
I'm fairly new to LEDs, at least as far as actually setting them up and wiring them myself. Hopefully this is the right place to post it. So here's what I'm doing, and what I need help with:
I'm custom building a model jawa sandcrawler computer case. I have 88 LEDs of the small yellow variety (2V each I think?), lighting up the case. The 20 LEDs in the cockpit section are running in 4 sets of 5 lights each, wired in series. The 4 sets themselves are wired in parallel. the rest of the lights in the case are wired in parallel: two strands of 20 lights, and one strand of 28 lights. Each strand is hooked up to an individual rheostat, actually a Zalman fan speed controller. For the most part this setup works, but recently I plugged the lights in through the Zalmans to the various fan headers on the motherboard, which supply about 12V, and one set of parallel lights fried, I'm not sure why. The Zalmans have worked reliably up til now to bring the voltage down to something that the LEDs can handle, but given how much of a pain it is to rewire, I need something more reliable. So....
Any recommendations on how I should at least re-wire the ones I just fried? This includes advice on what gauge wire to use, I've been using a gauge that I suspect is too thick. I have 5 available fan headers that put out about 12V each (probably a little less), although I'd prefer to use as few as possible - if there was a way to wire all 88 together and plug them into 1 fan header, that'd be perfect. But, I know that wiring more than a few lights purely in series kicks the voltage per light down so much that they're very dim, and I'd like them as bright as possible. Thanks in advance!
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Re: newbie wiring questions
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