You may have noticed a huge pile of boxes left on the front tables at the space. It turns out they are a surprise and very awesome donation of 10,000 or more 2700k - 4000k, 90cri, 2.5-3v all surface mount mostly 0603 size leds. Feel free to grab some if you have use for them in your projects!
Why yes, that is a lot of LEDs! People are working to get those boxes stored away. So come on out to open night and grab yours now while you can! These things are super bright so get started on those insane bike lights, cosplay projects, or that DIY tanning booth you’ve been meaning to make.
What’s left will be sorted/organized/passed along to whoever could used them.
Looks like mostly 3014-sized white LEDs of various temperatures. Nominally ~3v at 30-60mA.
Contest time?
I did the math once for a lamp I made, and a dim-but-nice ambient light for small room was about 700 lumens. And you can see in the datasheets that each of these LEDs are in the 10-30 lumens range.
Just to give you some ideas of what can be done with these!
Each reel is 1000-4000 pieces…
Maybe we can get a few workshops set up to help people learn how to drive these, then venture into how to make PCBs, and all the while have a contest set up on a longer timeframe (since people will likely have to get PCBs made).
Anyone who is qualified want to do a few nights on how to use these?
I’ve run a few Upverter workshops, and I have confidence that anyone who took those could design a PCB around this. I’m happy to help anyone that comes at my with questions / design review requests.
The TLC5947 might be suitable to run these. There are a couple examples already:
Here is my contribution, we can get 10 per chinese panel (100 for $US25 or so), it is intended to be static, you solder on the leds you want to make the letter you want and join them together to make a word. Styled after the McDonalds displays I remember staring at in Australia the 80s.
Hi All! I came in yesterday and did a little investigating as well as storing the boxes under the workbenches so we can have that clear for open house tonight. Please do not open the bags around the reels or shuffle the bags between boxes until we can get an idea of what we have exactly. The boxes have manifests on them and we are using those numbers to get the data sheets.
If you open a bag it must be used up within a few days and if not the LEDs will require a 24 hour bake at 70C to drive out the moisture they will absorb.
Rough estimate of quantity is between 1 and 2 million LEDs, one box for instance had 160,000! Each reel in bag has 2000 per. So opening a bag is a commitment.
At the moment I’m torn between simplicity (just use resistors) and complexity (use a constant current source). I’m learning toward complexity since it also gives dimming control which would make a more interesting sign but it adds about $5 per digit so perhaps not. I’ll probably do both eventually.
More than 0, no limit on number.
Not yet but there will be. I’m trying to decide whether to bring the power in using the standoffs, this seems to be simplest but might be a bit limiting. It does get around the problem that all the current needs to flow along the back otherwise (things get tricky once you pass 1A or so).
This really depends on the leds. For a sign you don’t want full brightness because it will hurt to look at it. The number 8 is about the most complex with 10 out of 16 segments lit, assuming the leds work at 10mA, an 8 would be 100mA. So lets say about 100mA per digit but less might work? This is at 12V so 1.2W per digit.
