LED Deck Light, Rev 1

[jyasaki]

Just got done with building a deck light for gearing up for night dives.

Housing is 9" long (could be smaller, but I was worried about heat dissipation), 2" wide, 2" tall (not counting the polycarb faceplate.) Electronics consist of 3 Luxeon K2 stars and a 1000mA BuckPuck constant current driver. The LED's have optics for a focused beam, diffused to a thin oval. Overall pattern is a soft 6-pointed star. LED's are mounted on a 7" piece of 1.5" bar stock, which is then screwed into the channel. I plan to glue the faceplate onto the channel once it's mounted.

Total parts cost was about $35 or so.

jky

[gtflash]

Originally Posted by jyasaki

(could be smaller, but I was worried about heat dissipation),
jky

what heat, from where?

[Aidan]

Have to agree, 12 watts per lamp assuming wired in parallel.
for DC, Power in Watts= I Amps x V Volts

1000m amps wouldnt do alot (4 times max telephone wire curent) not including ringing current.

Well you wont fry the boat!!!!

[jyasaki]

Originally Posted by gtflash

what heat, from where?

From the LED's. They have a power dissipation of about 3.4V (LED forward voltage) x 1 amp (drive current.) 3.5 watts each. Supposedly, max junction temp allowed is 180C, so I wanted to keep it well under that at the heatsink (and I didn't have the patience to work through all the formulae to figure out exactly what I'm running at.)

Once I get the unit mounted, I'll see about dropping the drive current based on how much light I actually need to get out of the thing. Though, I'm thinking about shrinking the size of the enclosure, and putting one on either side of the console. If that's the case, I'll install an adjustable current driver instead of the fixed one in place now.

jky