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NanoTopia's Pico LED fixture DIY Build


NanoTopia

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Nanotopia- Awesome build. I've been trying to find a thread like this for weeks.

 

I'm attempting to build my first LED for a 3g Marineland Eclipse. I was thinking about buying from RapidLED since ModularLED doesnt carrry the Royal blues anymore. I'll be basically following your same concent except I would like to add dimmers. Would that be an easy add?

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Nanotopia- Awesome build. I've been trying to find a thread like this for weeks.

 

I'm attempting to build my first LED for a 3g Marineland Eclipse. I was thinking about buying from RapidLED since ModularLED doesnt carrry the Royal blues anymore. I'll be basically following your same concent except I would like to add dimmers. Would that be an easy add?

You could add dimmers but you would have to go with different drivers, the ones I have used are not dimming drivers. If you step up the driver I would also consider you are running enough LED's on them. One alternative would be to use this Ecoxotic dimmer after the driver inline, this way you could stay with small nano drivers and have as many channels as you like. I found 6 x 3watt LED's a bit too powerful for the 3 gallon, good idea on the dimmers, you will likely need them.

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So your saying if i got 2 ecoxotic dimmers and 2 moonlight drivers i would be able to adjust 2 colors. Sorry im very new to this but your thread has sparked my interest. I also saw someone had mention the buck pucks on a post. Are those dimmable? or will the regular moonlight one work? Ill probably drop down to only 4 led (2 royal blue and 2 whites). I dont really want to buy a regular driver since its only a few LEDs. Your set up looks extrenly bright and cost effective.

 

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  • 4 months later...

You cannot add the Ecoxotic dimmers to the output of a constant current driver. Will not work. The Ecoxotic dimmers are just a resistive or pwm based dimmer. If it's resistive, all you will do is waste energy, and not get a lower light output (remember, CC drivers regulate current and adjust voltage to meet the requirements of what is hooked up to it). If it's pwm, that means that the output is turned on and off at a rapid rate, and may give some CC driver fits, where it will either shut the output off because it thinks there is a fault, or it may cook the LEDs due to an inductive spike (more likely on the cheaper drivers that won't have open circuit protection).

 

If you want to dim LEDs, get a dimmable driver.

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