DIY LED + DIY Arduino Typhon
- Thread starter thewarbrd
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Your expense included the controller for around 500. If I wanted to build the lights with some sort of adjustable power first how much do you think you have invested for just the led part? Not sure I can spend that much right now but would love to get this started.
I ordered 10 from iTead (minimum order), it worked out to $3.30 each shipped. I'm only building 3 so unless I mess a few up I should have some spares. We can work something out, cost + postage or cost + nice frag if I deliver them from Athens.
Or shoot me your email and I'll send you the files you need to send them when you order these.The LED kit was $389 as I configured it. I started off with the higher end 36 LED dimmable package RapidLED has and swapped out for higher end LED's and optics, so there's some wiggle room in there depending on what you get and from where. I've seen some say there's cheaper alternatives for where to get them but they're either not CREE's or are lower end versions.
Even though I got the PWM model drivers, you can also control them with a potentiometer style dimmer knob as well from what I've read, so that's an option to hold you over if you want to do a controller eventually, else you can get the non PWM model, I think they were a couple bucks cheaper if memory serves.
I can highly recommend RapidLED though, they sent me the missing Cool White and a replacement for the Royal Blue after I sent them a pic of it, no cost to me, and no runaround!
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Wow I guess go big or go home my arduino project is on hold right now I just have not had time to finish it
Guerry, what would you compare one of the heatsinks with lights on it to. I just ordered the controller and have been reading and came up with the idea to make one bank of lights and put them on a track to move accross the tank in 12 hour intervals to mimic the sun. So if I only had one how many leds would I need to at least equal my 6 bulb 4' t5's. Still not sure how to figure this out.
Thanks
Thanks
I'll give you guys actual par readings of fixture by end of weekend, from what I've tested sofar one pannel is well over what one 400watt MH is on my tank right now. Here's couple of pictures of finshed product and going to install today
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Well, I'm 0 for 2 tonight on building controllers!
PCB's came today and not paying attention I put two components in the wrong spots and when I pulled them I more or less cooked the board in that spot trying to clear the holes (must get a de-solderer tomorrow!) It took the software flash but only 2 of the 4 10v outputs have power, grrr. But I planned to have one 3-channel for the main tank and a 2-channel for a frag tank, guess this one volunteered for frag duty. Though, there's no reason I cant use two channels beings I've only got two colors so it would work on the main tank if I had to.
The second one went together pretty much flawless, which with me is always a bad sign in any project, and sure enough, I can't set the time on it! Other people have had that issue with theirs and it's usually either a bad connection to the clock chip (RTC) or bad RTC. I checked all the soldering on the board and hit a couple of connections that looked a little light, nada. Swapped the Arduino chip between boards, still nothing. So it's not the main chip, guess I'm back to it being board or RTC, bleh. But, this means I should have lights rather soon now, just gotta get a controller together that works 100%! grrrrr.
PCB's came today and not paying attention I put two components in the wrong spots and when I pulled them I more or less cooked the board in that spot trying to clear the holes (must get a de-solderer tomorrow!) It took the software flash but only 2 of the 4 10v outputs have power, grrr. But I planned to have one 3-channel for the main tank and a 2-channel for a frag tank, guess this one volunteered for frag duty.
Though, there's no reason I cant use two channels beings I've only got two colors so it would work on the main tank if I had to.The second one went together pretty much flawless, which with me is always a bad sign in any project, and sure enough, I can't set the time on it! Other people have had that issue with theirs and it's usually either a bad connection to the clock chip (RTC) or bad RTC. I checked all the soldering on the board and hit a couple of connections that looked a little light, nada. Swapped the Arduino chip between boards, still nothing. So it's not the main chip, guess I'm back to it being board or RTC, bleh. But, this means I should have lights rather soon now, just gotta get a controller together that works 100%! grrrrr.
SUCCESS! :yay:
I made great strides through the week and as of about 7:00 this evening, my tank is LED lit! I didn't go through too many hassles with taking pics every step of the way because my stuff looks largely like the threads I referenced in my initial post of this thread. So here are some before and afters
Top of the tank before. DIY Icecap retrofit kit, 2 Icecap 660's each driving two T5's. I had to run them out of the canopy due to heat, and also to mimic a higher mounting I saw at WorldWideCorals in Orlando, my tank responded well to it but it looked like crap. :yuk:
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Here's the top after, this returns me to what it looked like when the T5's were actually in the canopy. I'm back to the smaller two motor/blade window fan. This alone was worth 2 points from the wife beings the tank is in our living room :up:
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I mounted the new rack to the cross brace in the canopy with a couple of large zip ties. They're tight enough to hold it in place firmly, but loose enough to allow me to slide it back if I really need to root around in the tank. If I want to pop the canopy completely off, I used a couple of re-purposed molex connectors out of my stash of PC parts and the wire from the drivers up to the rack are a pair of 3-conductor PC power cables with the ends cut off. One plug has the two Royal Blue strings, the other does just the Cool Whites.
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And here's a shot of the drivers and controller mounted on their new home. I left the strip in place that allows me to check the milliamp levels of each string. I went with 750ma for the Royal Blues (rated 1000ma from the spec sheet) and 1000ma for the Cool Whites (rated to 1500ma). I'll probably end up tweaking them a little bit for color balance.
As you can kinda see from the display, I'm starting off at 40% max to see how things react beings I don't have a PAR meter. Also, beings the controller will be turning the lights on and off I opted to tie all 3 meanwells into one power cord, this project free'd up 2 slots on my RKL
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I'm going to a somewhat longer photo period too. I ran my T5's for 9 hours, with an hour on each end being actinics only, so that meant 7 hours of full light. I'm mostly softies, everything is well colored but my growth is sloooooow. For the new setup I'm starting off with this:
Royal #1 = 11:00am-10:30pm, 1 hour ramp up/down (max setting from noon-9:30pm)
Royal #2 = 11:30am-11:00pm, 1 hour ramp up/down (max setting from 12:30-10:00pm)
Whites = 12:30pm-9:30pm, 1 hour ramp up/down (max setting from 1:30-8:30pm)
I'll probably work on the ramp settings more, because that's a 2.5 hour sunrise and 2.5 hour sunset but still the same 7 hours full light I had with my t5's
FTS time. Here's before with all T5's on, this is with a point-and-shoot white balance adjusted. Notice not a whole lot of shadows, everything very evenly lit, including my powerheads which made them algae magnets!
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And with the LEDs, same as above, point-and-shoot, white balanced. ZOMG SHIMMER! I love the shadowing now, again this is only 40% power, even ramped all the way up there are still some shadows and shimmer.
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The only thing that will take some time getting used to is that having so many sources of light causes shadows from each emitter and as such you may have an area where a white casts a small shadow but the blue doesn't, it gives this odd white and blue thin line 'marble' effect to the sand bed which isn't very natural of course. I can't get a good picture of it to show.
Overall, I LOVE it! Not only because it give a completely new look to the tank and all of the benefits of LED's as far as power and fine tuning the colors, but this was something I built from scratch from boxes of parts which was entirely new to me.
I've got 2 fully functional arduino based controllers that I've already heavily re-written the code for, and I plan to try to code my own storm/cloud modes, and as well I'm considering using my 4th unused output on it to drive my moonlights assuming I can figure out how to calculate moon phase, that'll be one less dedicated to mess with.
Time to go stare at the 'new' tank with a cold one. :cheers:
I made great strides through the week and as of about 7:00 this evening, my tank is LED lit! I didn't go through too many hassles with taking pics every step of the way because my stuff looks largely like the threads I referenced in my initial post of this thread. So here are some before and afters
Top of the tank before. DIY Icecap retrofit kit, 2 Icecap 660's each driving two T5's. I had to run them out of the canopy due to heat, and also to mimic a higher mounting I saw at WorldWideCorals in Orlando, my tank responded well to it but it looked like crap. :yuk:
Here's the top after, this returns me to what it looked like when the T5's were actually in the canopy. I'm back to the smaller two motor/blade window fan. This alone was worth 2 points from the wife beings the tank is in our living room :up:
I mounted the new rack to the cross brace in the canopy with a couple of large zip ties. They're tight enough to hold it in place firmly, but loose enough to allow me to slide it back if I really need to root around in the tank. If I want to pop the canopy completely off, I used a couple of re-purposed molex connectors out of my stash of PC parts and the wire from the drivers up to the rack are a pair of 3-conductor PC power cables with the ends cut off. One plug has the two Royal Blue strings, the other does just the Cool Whites.
And here's a shot of the drivers and controller mounted on their new home. I left the strip in place that allows me to check the milliamp levels of each string. I went with 750ma for the Royal Blues (rated 1000ma from the spec sheet) and 1000ma for the Cool Whites (rated to 1500ma). I'll probably end up tweaking them a little bit for color balance.
As you can kinda see from the display, I'm starting off at 40% max to see how things react beings I don't have a PAR meter. Also, beings the controller will be turning the lights on and off I opted to tie all 3 meanwells into one power cord, this project free'd up 2 slots on my RKL
I'm going to a somewhat longer photo period too. I ran my T5's for 9 hours, with an hour on each end being actinics only, so that meant 7 hours of full light. I'm mostly softies, everything is well colored but my growth is sloooooow. For the new setup I'm starting off with this:
Royal #1 = 11:00am-10:30pm, 1 hour ramp up/down (max setting from noon-9:30pm)
Royal #2 = 11:30am-11:00pm, 1 hour ramp up/down (max setting from 12:30-10:00pm)
Whites = 12:30pm-9:30pm, 1 hour ramp up/down (max setting from 1:30-8:30pm)
I'll probably work on the ramp settings more, because that's a 2.5 hour sunrise and 2.5 hour sunset but still the same 7 hours full light I had with my t5's
FTS time. Here's before with all T5's on, this is with a point-and-shoot white balance adjusted. Notice not a whole lot of shadows, everything very evenly lit, including my powerheads which made them algae magnets!
And with the LEDs, same as above, point-and-shoot, white balanced. ZOMG SHIMMER!
I love the shadowing now, again this is only 40% power, even ramped all the way up there are still some shadows and shimmer.
The only thing that will take some time getting used to is that having so many sources of light causes shadows from each emitter and as such you may have an area where a white casts a small shadow but the blue doesn't, it gives this odd white and blue thin line 'marble' effect to the sand bed which isn't very natural of course. I can't get a good picture of it to show.
Overall, I LOVE it! Not only because it give a completely new look to the tank and all of the benefits of LED's as far as power and fine tuning the colors, but this was something I built from scratch from boxes of parts which was entirely new to me.
I've got 2 fully functional arduino based controllers that I've already heavily re-written the code for, and I plan to try to code my own storm/cloud modes, and as well I'm considering using my 4th unused output on it to drive my moonlights assuming I can figure out how to calculate moon phase, that'll be one less dedicated to mess with.
Time to go stare at the 'new' tank with a cold one. :cheers:
I've had some questions about actual cost on the controller which was right around $60 each to build THREE, so I'm posting up detailed info here...
If you have to order your own PCB's there's a minimum order of 10 at most every place, my $60 price takes into account the average cost of a PCB being $3.30, not the $33 shipped I paid for 10.
Also the average cost of components used was the cost shipped to me for three. So you could be approaching $80-100 building just one.
A fellow ARC'r is supposed to be sending me components to assemble a few for him with my leftover PCB's paying a nominal assembly fee, if that goes smoothly I may do a few more for cost+x if there's interest... x being cash or frags
Parts:
I ordered the PCBs from iTeadStudio using the attached gerber files, it was $33 shipped to me for the minimum order of 10.
I most all of the components from mousser.com, again enough to build 3, the order was $75.30 shipped. Bill of Materials attached. The only part I messed up on was I didnt catch that the person that put the list together used double right angle output headers the three channels, not 4, I haven't gone to look up the correct part number.
I got the 16x2 LCD screens off ebay, $20.97 shipped
ATmega328 with Arduino Bootloader (x3) and one breakout board for programming the chip from sparkfun.com: $35.86 shipped
Power supply from fry's, $9.99
Average Cost:
PCB: $3.30
Components from mousser: $25.10
LCD screens: 6.99
ATmega328 chip: $6.97
12v 1000ma power supply: $9.99
Subtotal: $52.35
Breakout board: $14.95 *** optional if you don't build it yourself and only want the basic pgm loaded by the builder
Total for an updatable controller $67.30
Again, figure a bit more (clower to $100) if you only build one because shipping wont be averaged across them. I built three because I'll have two tanks eventually and I wanted a 3rd for testing code changes on, plus I figured 'why not' when I had to order 10 PCB's anyway.
I'm assembling a few for a fellow ARC'r. They are sending me everything except the breakout board/powersupply/PCB and paying a few bucks assembly fee (too far away or I'd have done it for some frags!) If that goes smooth I may offer up that service to others.
<fieldset class="gc-fieldset">
<legend> Attached files </legend>
If you have to order your own PCB's there's a minimum order of 10 at most every place, my $60 price takes into account the average cost of a PCB being $3.30, not the $33 shipped I paid for 10.
Also the average cost of components used was the cost shipped to me for three. So you could be approaching $80-100 building just one.
A fellow ARC'r is supposed to be sending me components to assemble a few for him with my leftover PCB's paying a nominal assembly fee, if that goes smoothly I may do a few more for cost+x if there's interest... x being cash or frags
Parts:
I ordered the PCBs from iTeadStudio using the attached gerber files, it was $33 shipped to me for the minimum order of 10.
I most all of the components from mousser.com, again enough to build 3, the order was $75.30 shipped. Bill of Materials attached. The only part I messed up on was I didnt catch that the person that put the list together used double right angle output headers the three channels, not 4, I haven't gone to look up the correct part number.
I got the 16x2 LCD screens off ebay, $20.97 shipped
ATmega328 with Arduino Bootloader (x3) and one breakout board for programming the chip from sparkfun.com: $35.86 shipped
Power supply from fry's, $9.99
Average Cost:
PCB: $3.30
Components from mousser: $25.10
LCD screens: 6.99
ATmega328 chip: $6.97
12v 1000ma power supply: $9.99
Subtotal: $52.35
Breakout board: $14.95 *** optional if you don't build it yourself and only want the basic pgm loaded by the builder
Total for an updatable controller $67.30
Again, figure a bit more (clower to $100) if you only build one because shipping wont be averaged across them. I built three because I'll have two tanks eventually and I wanted a 3rd for testing code changes on, plus I figured 'why not' when I had to order 10 PCB's anyway.
I'm assembling a few for a fellow ARC'r. They are sending me everything except the breakout board/powersupply/PCB and paying a few bucks assembly fee (too far away or I'd have done it for some frags!) If that goes smooth I may offer up that service to others.
<fieldset class="gc-fieldset">
<legend> Attached files </legend>
