yorkie_chris
Newly Enlightened
- Joined
- Apr 27, 2012
- Messages
- 75
Hi guys
Looking at some lighting for the engine room of my boat
My first thought was to put a few star-mounted XP-G's or similar on some aluminium U section and then fill them with potting compound, preferably with enough in series that they can be direct driven. However this will get expensive quite quickly as I probably want 8 or 9 fittings in the various bits of engine room and may well be way over the top for brightness driving 9 of them in series per fitting.
My next thought was to use the commonly sold LED "mood lighting" - but we're swinging on spanners and stuff not having candlelit dinners, and at something like 5w/m or 350 lum/m it does not seem intense enough. Also it is unclear how well it will tolerate the potentially noisy and variable power supply.
I was wondering if you chaps had any good ideas or even something off the shelf.
I can do machining, soldering, PCBs at a push, but have never done surface mount soldering or soldering LED chips directly for that matter.
Design intents
-withstand damp environment
-similar light output to a 50-100w halogen
-not too blinding to work near (diffuse light, not like a garden floodlight)
-warm white colour with reasonable enough CRI to be comfortable to work with for wiring colours etc
-work at system voltages from 20v (no problem if it's dimmer if the batteries are low) up to 30v (nominal charging voltage is around 29V)
-withstand noisy power supply
-each individual lamp independent, no centralised driver (don't want one fault to plunge whole engine room into darkness)
-tough
-expedient to build
-economical
Cheers!
Looking at some lighting for the engine room of my boat
My first thought was to put a few star-mounted XP-G's or similar on some aluminium U section and then fill them with potting compound, preferably with enough in series that they can be direct driven. However this will get expensive quite quickly as I probably want 8 or 9 fittings in the various bits of engine room and may well be way over the top for brightness driving 9 of them in series per fitting.
My next thought was to use the commonly sold LED "mood lighting" - but we're swinging on spanners and stuff not having candlelit dinners, and at something like 5w/m or 350 lum/m it does not seem intense enough. Also it is unclear how well it will tolerate the potentially noisy and variable power supply.
I was wondering if you chaps had any good ideas or even something off the shelf.
I can do machining, soldering, PCBs at a push, but have never done surface mount soldering or soldering LED chips directly for that matter.
Design intents
-withstand damp environment
-similar light output to a 50-100w halogen
-not too blinding to work near (diffuse light, not like a garden floodlight)
-warm white colour with reasonable enough CRI to be comfortable to work with for wiring colours etc
-work at system voltages from 20v (no problem if it's dimmer if the batteries are low) up to 30v (nominal charging voltage is around 29V)
-withstand noisy power supply
-each individual lamp independent, no centralised driver (don't want one fault to plunge whole engine room into darkness)
-tough
-expedient to build
-economical
Cheers!