Those kooky, gigantic, 20mm LED's

[lifeson99]

Have you seen these ? They call them 20mm LED's but in reality they are a 20mm cluster of 6 LED's made to look like one giant, diffused LED. But they actually look great !! Bright as can be, and very intense color. You can find them on eBay, but FutureLEC sells them for just a buck.

I was hoping to connect a bunch of them in series with a chaser sequencer circuit I have, but it drives the outputs at standard LED power (5 volts / 30 mA). These puppies take 12 volts just to light up.

They do make a 12-pin version so you can power each internal LED separately:

. .

But that is a hassle to have to connect up 12 wires for a single LED. Still - these are interesting and worthy of mention, at least.

They make these in Red, Green, and Yellow. Can you beleive they left out Blue ? Hard to figger . . . more details on my website in the Tech/LEDs section: http://www.CaseModVideos.com

. .

 

[HEY HEY ITS HENDO]

Hey lifeson99 ....:welcome:.....
An excellent website you have there :thumbsup:

 

[LukeA]

If it takes 12V to light up and is 6 red junctions, then the junctions are in series. That's why there aren't blue ones. The total Vf for the thing would be ~24V.

 

[Gunner12]

DX also has a few, but they seem to only have one die (white, blue, red, green).

Most white and blue LEDs take from 3.2-3.7v to run correctly.

That's a pretty interesting site.

 

[lifeson99]

Those DealExtreme LED's are very rare - never seen anything like those anywhere.

By the way - I found one seller of Blue's. Kingbright 20mm LED's from the U.K., made by CML-IT are sold in the U.S. at Newark as a reseller for Farnell.com. CML is the ONLY manufacturer I can find for these Blue 20mm LEDs (12-pin only) and Newark sells them
But - and this is a a BIG BUTT !! They cost $11 each + $15 handling fee !! More than 10 times what the Red and Green ones sell for. I did buy a few but only because I have an LED collection. Ouch !!

 

[Gunner12]

Have you used high power colored LEDs yet(I'm just curious)?

For the price of that 20mm Blue LED, I'd rather buy this or this. It would be brighter and the bare emitter will be smaller but it would need a heatsink to run safely.

 

[lifeson99]

I haven't tried CREE yet, but it looks nice from the pic and the price is right. I do have a couple of LumiLED Luxeon Blue LEDs.

Actually I haven't even used these 20 mm LEDs yet other than to test them out. They would be nice as big indicator lamps for a panel, but would not illuminate an area like that CREE Blue will do. I was thinking of just for fun . . . running a row of them off of an LED sequencer to get the "Knight Rider" effect, or maybe just a standard running LED effect.

ls

 

[Stillphoto]

Now what would really be fun - A 2AA mag mod with one of these protruding out where the lens used to be...Big 'ol gumdrop of light. Would definitely have to boost that voltage up to get 12v though.