LED drivers – Update
When you start building objects like these lighting systems there are things that you don’t make yourself but which you buy, like aluminum tubing or the microprocessor board that runs the show. I also bought the LED driver boards that allow for the smooth blending of colors. These were designed by another hobbyist and he had a blog set up through which these could be purchased.
Last year when I was ready to build a second model I had hoped to contact him again for another set of these wonderful devices, but I discovered much to my dismay that he had apparently abandoned his blog as he had not responded to any questions or inquiries on his blog.
Fortunately he published the designs of his high brightness LED driver board as open source/open hardware and for the last several months I’ve been working on redesigning the board. While the final PCBs are not likely to come from ITEAD studio in China, this it what is show in the image below. Pretty nice for the price if you ask me! 10 boards for little more $50. The photo makes these look huge but in reality they are about 2″ x 2″. I am still waiting for the Inductors to come in from the UK (were not available in the US) and I should have assembled and functional prototypes within the next 3-4 weeks. My PID controlled Toaster oven is already set up and tuned to follow a temperature profile and I am feverishly waiting for the last components and the solder paste (lead free) to arrive.
For more details on these please follow this link http://ledshield.wordpress.com
Posted on March 16, 2013, in Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink. 6 Comments.
Trippy Lighting 
Hi,
Yesterday I posted my congratulations on completing your working prototype of the Arduino HPLED shield. It really looks beautiful.
I am now really curious to learn your plans re. manufacturing assembled units of your revised boards. I’m working on a couple of projects that could use these boards and I’d like to know if I should plan on follow you (and start building the boards myself), or if I should plan to buy them from you.
Will you be selling them? If so, when? Do you have an idea re. what price you’ll be charging for the completed boards? At first, I’d be interested in buying 1 or 2 as prototypes, but if they work in my application, then I’d be interested in buying as many as 10 boards at a time.
Please let me know how you’d like to discuss this.
Thanks,
Bruce
Bruce,
I’d be very interested to see what your application for these is. If you don’t want to share this publicly you can email me privately.
Yes, we definitely want to manufacture, or preferably have these boards manufactured professionally. We’ve talked to a small company specialized in it and have received a couple of quotes. I’ll post more on that shortly on the blog.
However, the question is, how many of these boards can we sell. There have been a good number of views on the blog, but very few people have stopped by and left a response indicating interest in purchasing a board. So it is to rather hard to make even an educated guess at demand.
If for example we only sell 10 boards in 6 months then I would contemplate making that number of boards myself. However if we approach a qty of 100 annually then we would likely have these manufactured.
Do you intend to publish your redesign as open source/open hardware?
I am really interested in the v2.5 schematics and BOM.
Mark,
Yes, that is the idea. I have not published the source files yet but will at some point in time. In the meantime I could email these to you.
There is really surprisingly little difference between the V2 and V2.5 schematic. I believe the only thins I added were the solder jumpers to enable/disable the pull-up resistors on the top and on the bottom I added solder jumpers so the user can select between the “old” s
I2C pins (4, 5) or the new ones on the Leonardo and Yún.
The board layout on the other hand underwent quite a cleanup.
“Fortunately he published the designs of his high brightness LED driver board as open source/open hardware and for the last several months I’ve been working on redesigning the board.”
Did you mean “he” is on http://ledshield.wordpress.com?But I havn’t seen any open hardware/software, Could you provide a detail link? Thanks
Hi,
With “he” I was referring to neuroelec who was the initial designer of the shield but then abandoned his creation an the associated blog.
The ledshield blog is hosts by two people with me having provided most of the content while re-designing the shield.
You are correct! I speak about a Github account on ledshield.wordpress.com but never provided a link. Sorry about that 🙂
Here it is:
https://github.com/TrippyLighting