blasterman
Flashlight Enthusiast
- Joined
- Jul 17, 2008
- Messages
- 1,802
IdleProcess beat me to it in his thread below by using the idea of directly mounting LED stars to 1" Aluminum bar (Home Depot, etc). I've otherwise liked the results of my project here.
Basically I'm dealing with a pretty busy Nightclub/Bar where the drink stations are poorly lit. At night during club hours it was otherwise impossible for the wait staff to tell drinks apart and confusion and aggravation would soon follow.
Obviously there's a ton of commercial LED products available, but none I really liked. My experience is most of them consist of either cheap 5mm LEDs that fade quickly, mystery brand power LEDs, or just plain poor design. I wanted perfectly white LEDs with an approx 25 degree throw straight down and not spraying light at odd angles and being distracting.
So, I used the Aluminum bar in a 36" length, and thermal-epoxied three Luxeon III's to the thing. I then epoxied L2 lenses to each. By drilling a few additional holes I was able to run the wiring underneath and invisible to view. Simple, but worked perfectly. Power is supplied by a nearby PC via snaking in through an open PCI slot to a 4-pin molex. The rig is more than bright enough, so the Lux IIIs worked perfectly.
The attached shots show my homebrew lightbar (first shot) compared to commercial LED pucks running a cluster of 5mm LEDs (second shot). The Lux III's are quite a bit brighter than the commercial pucks (obviously), and color is neutral white -vs- blue white. The images don't show just how much difference there is.
The problem is the project worked so well that we're going to use LEDs as more direct accent/work lighting and kill off as many halogens as possible. This will require Cree Q5's alternating with blue LEDs, but it should be a fun project and I've already designed those custom heads.
Basically I'm dealing with a pretty busy Nightclub/Bar where the drink stations are poorly lit. At night during club hours it was otherwise impossible for the wait staff to tell drinks apart and confusion and aggravation would soon follow.
Obviously there's a ton of commercial LED products available, but none I really liked. My experience is most of them consist of either cheap 5mm LEDs that fade quickly, mystery brand power LEDs, or just plain poor design. I wanted perfectly white LEDs with an approx 25 degree throw straight down and not spraying light at odd angles and being distracting.
So, I used the Aluminum bar in a 36" length, and thermal-epoxied three Luxeon III's to the thing. I then epoxied L2 lenses to each. By drilling a few additional holes I was able to run the wiring underneath and invisible to view. Simple, but worked perfectly. Power is supplied by a nearby PC via snaking in through an open PCI slot to a 4-pin molex. The rig is more than bright enough, so the Lux IIIs worked perfectly.
The attached shots show my homebrew lightbar (first shot) compared to commercial LED pucks running a cluster of 5mm LEDs (second shot). The Lux III's are quite a bit brighter than the commercial pucks (obviously), and color is neutral white -vs- blue white. The images don't show just how much difference there is.
The problem is the project worked so well that we're going to use LEDs as more direct accent/work lighting and kill off as many halogens as possible. This will require Cree Q5's alternating with blue LEDs, but it should be a fun project and I've already designed those custom heads.
