LED_ASAP
Enlightened
Class 4 entry: AAAA\'s new hat
I couldn't stop banging my head when I ruined a nice R3K SE by carelessly touching the inverted cone with a hot soldering ion /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/banghead.gif After letting it sit in my ever-growing pile of "dead solders", I figured I would try a heart transplant---fitting the Luxeon chip to the Arc AAA's Little Brother.
First, the half-melted SE dome was pried off with a paper cutter blade; the bond wire was disconnected from the leads and the base was nipped off with a nail cutter.
The next step was to reduce the size of the slug where the Luxeon chip was mounted. It was done by holding the slug base in a pair of pliers and sawing off the top portion (where the LED die was)
Here is a close up shot of the LED die on the reminence of the slug
The "mini-Luxeon" was epoxied to the converter board---make sure the polarity was correct by checking with the DMM's diode testing function.
Here is a size comparison of the converter board and a Luxeon emitter.
Connecting the bond wire to the board was really tricky with only a soldering ion, as the gold bond wire melted around the same temperature as the best "low melting point", silver-bearing solder I cound find.
Fortunately I made the connection before all the bond wire melted away /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/icon6.gif
The converter was a rearranged version of the old trusty Arc AAA circuit (see here), although I replaced the inductor with one with a smaller footprint.
The board was epoxied to protect the bare Luxeon die, and the "pill" was pushed into a plastic "shell" that fits snuggly ontop of a "pseudo AAAA" pulled from a 9V battery.
The On/Off control was done by pushing and pulling the "hat" vs. the battery.
The brightness was less than I had hoped. Because lots of side spill was wasted, and I only have regular clear epoxy instead of "optical grade" epoxy.
Left: Arc AAA; right: Heart-transplanted "Arc AAAA"
This is quite a challenging project, and hopefully it has put me as the first to have completed a heart transplant on a Luxeon /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif
I couldn't stop banging my head when I ruined a nice R3K SE by carelessly touching the inverted cone with a hot soldering ion /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/banghead.gif After letting it sit in my ever-growing pile of "dead solders", I figured I would try a heart transplant---fitting the Luxeon chip to the Arc AAA's Little Brother.
First, the half-melted SE dome was pried off with a paper cutter blade; the bond wire was disconnected from the leads and the base was nipped off with a nail cutter.
The next step was to reduce the size of the slug where the Luxeon chip was mounted. It was done by holding the slug base in a pair of pliers and sawing off the top portion (where the LED die was)
Here is a close up shot of the LED die on the reminence of the slug
The "mini-Luxeon" was epoxied to the converter board---make sure the polarity was correct by checking with the DMM's diode testing function.
Here is a size comparison of the converter board and a Luxeon emitter.
Connecting the bond wire to the board was really tricky with only a soldering ion, as the gold bond wire melted around the same temperature as the best "low melting point", silver-bearing solder I cound find.
Fortunately I made the connection before all the bond wire melted away /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/icon6.gif
The converter was a rearranged version of the old trusty Arc AAA circuit (see here), although I replaced the inductor with one with a smaller footprint.
The board was epoxied to protect the bare Luxeon die, and the "pill" was pushed into a plastic "shell" that fits snuggly ontop of a "pseudo AAAA" pulled from a 9V battery.
The On/Off control was done by pushing and pulling the "hat" vs. the battery.
The brightness was less than I had hoped. Because lots of side spill was wasted, and I only have regular clear epoxy instead of "optical grade" epoxy.
Left: Arc AAA; right: Heart-transplanted "Arc AAAA"
This is quite a challenging project, and hopefully it has put me as the first to have completed a heart transplant on a Luxeon /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif
