Subscribe to this blog's feed
Here is an excellent resource, certainly worth bookmarking if you are creating your own LED lighting systems - the LED series/parallel array wizard.It describes itself:
The LED series/parallel array wizard is a calculator that will help you design large arrays of LEDs. The LED calculator was great for single LEDs--but when you have several, the wizard will help you arrange them in a series or combined series/parallel configuration. The wizard determines the current limiting resistor value for each portion of the array and calculates power consumed. All you need to know are the specs of your LEDs and how many you'd like to use.Check out the screen grab below for our example generation.
Does anyone know of other LED calculation resource pages? Please get in touch and share with fellow Gadget Masters.
Comments (2)
Well, I tried this LED wizard to drive 7 LED's from a 13.5V source (LED voltage drop = 2.7V each), at 20mA per LED.
One of the options it gave me was 5 LED's in series, with a 1ohm limiting resistor, all paralleled with the last 2 LED's in series, with 470 ohms.
Clearly, the 2-LED-plus-470-ohms chain is fine. But I'm really worried about the 5-LED-plus-1-ohm. (Where the 1 ohm came from beats me as the 5 LEDs add up to 13.5V anyway). If the 13.5V rose to 13.6V then the current would rise massively! And if LED voltage drop altered, due to temperature etc, then again this chain's current would alter drastically. No warnings are given.
Not a credible wizard I'm afraid...
Posted by Peter F Vaughan | October 27, 2010 12:16 PM
Posted on October 27, 2010 12:16
Thanks for the feedback, Paul. What do other readers think of its results?
Posted by Alun Williams - Electronics Weekly.com
|
October 27, 2010 5:21 PM
Posted on October 27, 2010 17:21