Voltage Stepper for LED Off Road Light Bar

[here4fun]

Good day. I am trying to create a solution for dimming a dimmable LED off road light that I would like to mount on my Jeep Wrangler manufactured by Rigid Industries - http://www.rigidindustries.com/ . It appears that each 10" of LED light bar results in ~ 2.6+ Amps of load. Please provide your feedback on creating the proxy for a potentiometer which scales the voltage from 7V to 9V and full power at 12V+ on the aforementioned products. I am open to both inline dial and circuit based solutions as this could be an on demand / in cab or under hood solution.

Many thanks in advance for your consideration of this inquiry.

Cheers.

 

[mboni]

Typically, this type of LED light bar has a built-in voltage regulator, meaning it'll run at the same brightness for a wide range of input voltages. So dropping the input voltage with a potentiometer won't accomplish what you want.

Instead, you need to use something called PWM, Pulse Width Modulation, where the power is turned on and off rapidly, dimming the LEDs by running them only a fraction of the time. It's a more complex circuit to build, but you should be able to buy something pre-made that handles the job.

Alternately, if you are going to mount multiple light bars, just make them individually switched.

 

[LEDobsession]

Typically, this type of LED light bar has a built-in voltage regulator, meaning it'll run at the same brightness for a wide range of input voltages. So dropping the input voltage with a potentiometer won't accomplish what you want.

Instead, you need to use something called PWM, Pulse Width Modulation, where the power is turned on and off rapidly, dimming the LEDs by running them only a fraction of the time. It's a more complex circuit to build, but you should be able to buy something pre-made that handles the job.

Alternately, if you are going to mount multiple light bars, just make them individually switched.

+1

You'll most likely need PWM.