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LED addition and controller advice


Deebo

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Hey LEDgroupbuy + Nano-Reef,

 

Little ironic I find myself at nano-reef again, 3 years after upgrading my 30g, while setting up my lighting for my new 220g tank :D

 

So I was looking around for 40 degree lenses for the XMLs and found your site and I really like the Lumia 5.2s so I looked through the site quite a bit and I got a really cool thought on how I can use them to upgrade my lighting. I am currently setting up a 6' x 2.5' x 2', peninsula style tank. I used RapidLED for my first DIY led build so I purchased most of the LEDs and equipment for this tank already from them, but after looking through site I have been brainstorming and there are some changes and upgrades I want to do. Before I get into that, let me fill you guys in on what I am working with atm for my lighting.

 

I have 4, 48" x 1.4" heat sinks that will be attached to each other making a 5.6" x 48" fixture. I have 96 LEDs: 3 XP-E Red, 2 XP-E Red/Orange, 7 Philips Rebel Cyan, 7 XP-E Green, 10 XP-E Blue, 31 XT-E Royal Blue, 12 SemiLED Violet UV, 12 XML Cool White, and 12 XML Neutral White.

I am currently running everything with my Apex and for drivers I have: 3 Meanwell ELN-60-27D, 7 Meanwell ENL-60-48D, 1 Meanwell LPC-35-700, and 1 Meanwell ELN-60-24D at my disposal but I certainly don't need to use them all.

Along with this I also have 3, 200mm PC fans, hanging kits.. etc.

I plan on using 40 degree lenses and mounting the fixture about 23" or so above the water level so the light hits the inside of the glass around half way down. My tank is euro-braced and will not have a canopy so the lighting fixture is going to be well designed to be another cool part of my tank.

 

For additions, I already wanted to add 24 LEDs that I was going to decide on after seeing the system up and running and choosing colors based on what I researched/wanted. When I was checking out the Lumias and re-reading "The Reef Aquarium" volume three, I thought it would be really cool and probably beneficial to have one Lumia on each side of the fixture, angled to make a sunrise/sunset. After checking out the Lumias power source, realizing that Sunrise LEDs > Middle LEDs > Sunset LEDs would need a bit more than 8 channels, and reading a few posts in the LEDgroupbuy forum, I started looking into the Storm X. Considering I have been working with some really basic Arduino robotics, "Sparkfun's Inventors kit for Arduino", I am very interested in slowly learning and upgrading my system outside of just buying Neptune addition modules. Also, being able to read the temp of my heat sinks would be invaluable.

 

I am thinking that I want 3-4 dimming channels for each of the 2 Lumias, and 4-5 dimming channels for the main led fixture and since the Storm X has 16, I should be all set with room to upgrade. Also, I don't have any experience with DC-DC drivers, although it seems easy enough to follow, especially with the LDD drive board.

 

Other than just overall advice, suggestions, comments, criticisms, I have a few questions:

- Why do the LDD drivers only go up to 1A? I know I have many 700mA rated LEDs as well as some 1000mA, but I also have the Royal Blues that can go to 1500mA and XML at 3000mA. Is there an efficiency issue here or should those LEDs be powered that high?

- Is there a good place to really look into the possibilities with the Storm X? I would really like to look into the potential of it and what I can do with it.

- Would the 96 LEDs I have and 2, Lumia 5.2s be a good amount of light for my set up if I am looking to house mainly LPS and SPS? Very newbie question I know, but I am interested in opinions.

- How is my current selection of colors? I can see that favor is shifting from reds to the warm whites so fortunately, with DIY leds it is very easy to change as more and more R+D becomes available. Although, I thought it would be pretty awesome to have some reds on a separate channel so I can turn them on for night time viewing.

- How is the Storm X, "Arduino Compatible"? As my Arduino experience is extremely limited, I am not really sure how other things work with it.

 

I am sure there is much more that I forgot but I can't think of them now and I am sure I have made a nice wall of text to start with. Thank you very much, I really appreciate the time you take to read over this and help me out!

 

 

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jedimasterben

Oh boy lol, that's a lot to go over! :D

 

I have 4, 48" x 1.4" heat sinks that will be attached to each other making a 5.6" x 48" fixture. I have 96 LEDs: 3 XP-E Red, 2 XP-E Red/Orange, 7 Philips Rebel Cyan, 7 XP-E Green, 10 XP-E Blue, 31 XT-E Royal Blue, 12 SemiLED Violet UV, 12 XML Cool White, and 12 XML Neutral White.

I am currently running everything with my Apex and for drivers I have: 3 Meanwell ELN-60-27D, 7 Meanwell ENL-60-48D, 1 Meanwell LPC-35-700, and 1 Meanwell ELN-60-24D at my disposal but I certainly don't need to use them all.

Along with this I also have 3, 200mm PC fans, hanging kits.. etc.

Keep the LEDs that are in bold. The rest don't need to be added separately, and the XM-L have terrible color, especially off-axis.

 

Also, I don't have any experience with DC-DC drivers, although it seems easy enough to follow, especially with the LDD drive board.

Super simple, the power supply feeds the LDD which feeds the LEDs :)

 

Other than just overall advice, suggestions, comments, criticisms, I have a few questions:

- Why do the LDD drivers only go up to 1A? I know I have many 700mA rated LEDs as well as some 1000mA, but I also have the Royal Blues that can go to 1500mA and XML at 3000mA. Is there an efficiency issue here or should those LEDs be powered that high?

The LDD-H go to 1A with 56v/52v input/output maximum, the LDD-L go to 1.5A with a 36v/30v input/output maximum. Once you pass 1A on the XT-E, you lose efficiency far faster than you gain luminous output, and you increase the Tj temperature quickly, as well.

 

- Is there a good place to really look into the possibilities with the Storm X? I would really like to look into the potential of it and what I can do with it.

coralux.net

 

I don't know of anyone that has reprogrammed it, if that's what you're meaning, though, but you can download their Arduino sketch and edit it and write it to the controller.

 

- Would the 96 LEDs I have and 2, Lumia 5.2s be a good amount of light for my set up if I am looking to house mainly LPS and SPS? Very newbie question I know, but I am interested in opinions.

I think for your situation (and ditching the LEDs above), I would use either two or three of the 5.2 and surround them with the other LEDs, not just have the Lumias on the outside as sunrise/sunset, that's a huge waste of them IMHO, they're made to be main lighting, so you'll get the best bang for your buck doing it that way.

 

- How is my current selection of colors? I can see that favor is shifting from reds to the warm whites so fortunately, with DIY leds it is very easy to change as more and more R+D becomes available. Although, I thought it would be pretty awesome to have some reds on a separate channel so I can turn them on for night time viewing.

That's the only situation IMHO that you'd want to keep the 630nm reds :)

- How is the Storm X, "Arduino Compatible"? As my Arduino experience is extremely limited, I am not really sure how other things work with it.

The Storm is an Arduino controller, so you have all the capabilities of any other that's using the same chip (I can't remember which off the top of my head).

 

So all in all, I would use the following:

2x 5.2

24x Nichia high-CRI neutral white (much better color than the XM-L and XT-E)

32x XT-E royal blue (because I like having even numbers lol)

4x Luxeon M royal blue (these are equivalent to 4x XT-E at the same current, you can also switch out what you have with them for a total of 12x Luxeon M across the tank)

12x XP-E/XP-E2 blue

7x Rebel cyan (I would add a few more cyan for spread, 12x total)

24x violet (so your 12x SemiLED and then add 12x true violet [since the SemiLED cover the higher violet range])

 

It changes up your plan a bit, but you'll end up with drastically better color and coverage. If you're only planning on having rockwork down the center of the tank, the numbers of additional LEDs besides the Lumia can be reduced.

 

You can run both Lumia in series from a set of five LDD, two 1A, three 700mA. The LDD have a total of around 45v output when run on a 48v power supply. I really do not like the power supplies that LEDgroupbuy sells, I would personally opt for a Meanwell HLG series power supply - they are IP65 or IP67 rated (so basically waterproof, which is what you want around saltwater lol) and quite a bit more efficient. If you go the route I listed above, In addition to the 5x LDD needed for the Lumia, you'll want 2x 1A LDD to run the Nichia, 3x to run the XT-E royals, 2x 1A to run the M (unless you adjust the power supply to output 51v instead of 48v, it's simple to do, once that happens, you only need 1x LDD to run four M), 1x 1A for the XP-E/XP-E2 blue, 1x 1A for the cyan, and 2x 700mA for the violet. Full power draw would be 150w for the two Lumia and 350w for the rest. I doubt you'd need to ever run them that high, but that would be if you set everything to 100%. You'd need two HLG-320H-48A (run both Lumia, NW, and cyan from one, then the RB, blue, and violet off of the other). For the reds as moonlights, add a 300mA LDD.

 

The Storm has 16x channels, so if you wanted to do sunrise/sunset across the tank, then if done in half you have 8x dimming channels per side, 7x on one of them since you'll have moonlights you'll need to turn on/off. You'll only have 5x total groups of colors to dim individually (white on the Lumia and the nichia, royal blue on the Lumia and the XT-E, the blue on the Lumia and the XP-E, the cyan Rebels, and the violet on the Lumia and the Semi), so you could actually do them all separately still (each Lumia individually on four channels [since CH1 and CH5 are identical] and then the NW nichia and cyan on one channel, the royal blue and blue on one channel, and the violet on one channel, split into the halves of the tank. That would use a total of 14x channels, with the moonlighting taking up the 15th, so you'll actually have one left over :)

 

I think that covers everything, or at least a whole lot. I hope it isn't too confusing, as I definitely confused myself a couple of times in that lol.

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That was a fantastic reply. Thank you very much! I had no problems following.

 

For the Luxeon M Royal Blue LEDs, is there a 40 degree lens available? Actually, is there one available for they Rebel Cyans as well? At the 90 degree standard that the luxeons have, a ton of the light is missing the tank. Also, what are the options for optics for the Nichias and true violets?

 

You have a few lenses and reflectors on your build thread that I wouldn't know anything about but I am certainly curious.

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