James S
Flashlight Enthusiast
experiments with square white LED\'s
Hi Folks,
I've been meaning to play with some of the square "spider" type led's. I was disappointed to see that lumileds doesn't appear to make a white one! But Vishay (I think) does. It's not listed as a very bright one, but it comes in the same package. I ordered them from Newark, stock no. 07C1058. I knew they were going to be dim, but a bank of 10 of them does still produce a nice area light. The viewing angle was said to be 30 degrees, but I think it has got to be higher than that. It's a very wide flood light and easily lights a whole room in the dark.
This has the 10 led cubes wired in parallel to 3 AAA batteries. This is direct drive, no resistance at all. I used a 4 AAA cube holder from radio shack and mounted the switch in the 4th unused section.
The metal pieces are brass plates that I soldered directly to the negative terminals along the outside of the array as a heat sink. They need to be filed down a little as they are rather sharp. They are outside the beam, so although they look like an attempt to be a reflector, they don't do anything for the beam. I could have bent them the other way, but I didn't want them to get in the way of the batteries.
As I said the light output is not great. It's very similar however to the output of the colman CCFT lantern that I wrote about a couple of weeks ago. The color is warmer though. Here are some shots of it on.
The blue color in the pictures is deceiving. The light actually has very good color, it's not what I would consider warm, but it does not have the obvious blue of many of my purchased led lights. The output of each one also has a green tinge around the edges as if it were a mini-luxeon. It's not pronounced except for the fact that it reflects through the housing of the LED.
I measure the entire array pulling 400ma, so 40ma a piece. The other interesting thing is that there is no problem running these in parallel, they seem to be very uniform in their output and color.
So, banks of these wont be replacing your luxeons at any time, but for $1.02 a piece from Newark they are inexpensive and easy to build arrays of. Just don't expect them to blind you.
Hi Folks,
I've been meaning to play with some of the square "spider" type led's. I was disappointed to see that lumileds doesn't appear to make a white one! But Vishay (I think) does. It's not listed as a very bright one, but it comes in the same package. I ordered them from Newark, stock no. 07C1058. I knew they were going to be dim, but a bank of 10 of them does still produce a nice area light. The viewing angle was said to be 30 degrees, but I think it has got to be higher than that. It's a very wide flood light and easily lights a whole room in the dark.
This has the 10 led cubes wired in parallel to 3 AAA batteries. This is direct drive, no resistance at all. I used a 4 AAA cube holder from radio shack and mounted the switch in the 4th unused section.
The metal pieces are brass plates that I soldered directly to the negative terminals along the outside of the array as a heat sink. They need to be filed down a little as they are rather sharp. They are outside the beam, so although they look like an attempt to be a reflector, they don't do anything for the beam. I could have bent them the other way, but I didn't want them to get in the way of the batteries.
As I said the light output is not great. It's very similar however to the output of the colman CCFT lantern that I wrote about a couple of weeks ago. The color is warmer though. Here are some shots of it on.
The blue color in the pictures is deceiving. The light actually has very good color, it's not what I would consider warm, but it does not have the obvious blue of many of my purchased led lights. The output of each one also has a green tinge around the edges as if it were a mini-luxeon. It's not pronounced except for the fact that it reflects through the housing of the LED.
I measure the entire array pulling 400ma, so 40ma a piece. The other interesting thing is that there is no problem running these in parallel, they seem to be very uniform in their output and color.
So, banks of these wont be replacing your luxeons at any time, but for $1.02 a piece from Newark they are inexpensive and easy to build arrays of. Just don't expect them to blind you.
