LED DIY BUILD – plug & play and open source join forces

[jfarabaugh]

ITS COMING SOON

 

This is a picture from outside my house. The light is on the floor of my office with the blinds and the curtains shut. It is so bright I literally need to wear sunglasses in the room to avoid seeing spots and seeing in B&W for the next 10 minutes. Even better is the fact that I hit it with my cheapo spectrometer and I got the full visual spectrum with pretty even strength throughout…violet through red and ALL the colors in-between.

 

[acme54321]

ITS COMING SOON

 

 

Weeeeeeeeelllllll?

[jfarabaugh]

I finally just finished up everything tonight that was needed for it to go into the tank. I had some issues with the arduino boards so I dropped back to old school for right now and put together a controller box with 4 POTS.

 

once I get it in the tank and I am happy with the LED selection I will be correcting the issues with the arduino boards.

 

It has been a long time coming but life and work got in the way.

[jfarabaugh]

IT IS FINALLY IN THE TANK!! But no pictures for tonight. I will take the best pictures I can with my P&S tomorrow night and post them up for all to see. I spent a good deal of time over the past few days checking out different LED lighting setups all consisting of the standard CW RB combos so that I could compare. The addition of the NW, Blues, and violet LEDS made a world of difference. I have never really seen anything like it when I turn just the RB, blues, and violets on.

I have a good deal of surface turbulence in my tank so the shimmer effect was just stupid looking and incredibly distracting….plus I have never been a huge fan of the look. I added a clear diamond pattern light diffuser to deal with this. I was very impressed by the difference it made. I have a slight shimmer in the tank now and am very happy with it. I can’t stress enough how much I like the look of the light with the diamond pattern diffuser in place. Anyone with an LED setup should try it out as an experiment especially since a 2’x 4’ sheet is only $7.00 at HD. This would be a great help if you are having issues with color blending / shadows.

As I said before I had some issues with the controller that I started this thread with so I went with my backup plan for now but I hope to work the issues out in the new year.

For now I put together a 4 channel controller that allows me to mix the colors any which way. In all honesty I really like all the channels equally set as it gives a nice look to the tank. Right now all the channels are set to about 25% and I will keep it at this setting for awhile and see how the corals react.

Channels

1- 12 NW

2- 6 CW

3- 12 RB

4- 6 B & 6 V

[jfarabaugh]

So after about 50 pictures and 3 different videos I just can’t capture the color of the LEDs what so ever. I really thought I would be able at least halfway but even with adjusting the white balance, exp, and iso my P&S just can’t capture it. Santa won’t let me have my DSLR until xmas so you folks will have to wait to see what it really looks like.

Here is a bad pic (nothing what it looks like with the naked eye) of the tank and the controller. From these pictures at least you can tell that there is no color blending\shadow issues (usually seen on the sand) that you can see on most other LED setups.