DIY LedZeal/Vipar extreme mod: Can it be done?

[Lightspeed]

Not quite sure where to put this question / idea.

This is a longshot, but during the time i took before deciding to purchase a completely new display, i had been researching budget led fixtures and aquired 2x 165 Vipars and 1x Ledzeal Malubu S200.
These would have been fine for lighting as i was originally converting my Juwel Vision 450 over to Marine.
As it stands i now have the above led fixtures that will not be used as the Juwel has T5 hood, and i have a custom display under construction by FireAqua.

So any DIY sparkies out there who may be able to shed some light(no pun intended) on whether i can utilize the Wifi and app on the Ledzeal but extend the 4 circuits / channels to accommodate the extra Vipar led's and break up / extend the lighting circuit to run off the Ledzeal circuit as a host WIFI controller.

To big of a project? Probably. Too complicated? Probably.
But can it be done? Well the answer to that is more than likely probably too as i have no idea how the Ledzeal circuit operates, but if you think you can be of assistance, please come forward.

Regards
B.

 

[Michael Lane]

I don't know anything about Ledzeal, but we could probably make some educated guesses if you can open the fixture and post some clear pictures of what's going on inside.

The viparspectra lights are pretty simple to control. I have a thread on controlling them with reef-pi. They run based on 3.3v PWM, to it might be possible to send a signal from Ledzeal over a cable to the vipars.

 

[Lightspeed]

Not sure but looking at both the LedZeal and the Vipars shows some significant differences in PCB with the Vipar being the simplest to mod.
The LedZeal is vastly different as it uses a Power supply with no LED drivers utilized separately as is the most common with simple LED fixtures.

Here's the pics of the Ledzeal PCB, Led circuit and power supply spec

RE; the topi 2 pics, The Bottom two Red and Black being the main power input, the top two plugs Green, Black, Red, Yellow are power and signal to the cooling fans.
The Side output wires go directly to the LED circuits, one for each Led array.
Of note on the LED arrays are (i think) crystal diodes placed in line between each of the LED diodes, also an IC for each channel, this is something that is not found on the Vipar LED circuit.
In comparing a single Vipar 165W with the Malibu s200, the Vipar visually looks by far a stronger light source, maybe just due to the tight grouping of the Arrays on the Vipar with the Ledzeal somewhat spread using 3 separate arrays.
I am not entirely sure as i do not have the tech experience with electronic circuits, but extending the channels on the LedZeal may overload the control board as extra voltage and current will be required to drive the added LED"s on the 4 channels regardless of whether the power supply is changed to accommodate the extra amperage and voltage drain.

Here's the Vipar

 

[Michael Lane]

It looks like the Ledzeal incorporates the current driver into the rest of the circuitry. There's probably a PWM signal controlling those mosfets. If so, you could route that signal to the vipars. You'd have to poke around to see.

There might be a connector or something exposed under one of those other boards. Some of the Ledzeals claim to have signal chaining, so maybe there's an unpopulated header.

 

[oreo54]

It looks like the Ledzeal incorporates the current driver into the rest of the circuitry. There's probably a PWM signal controlling those mosfets. If so, you could route that signal to the vipars. You'd have to poke around to see.

There might be a connector or something exposed under one of those other boards. Some of the Ledzeals claim to have signal chaining, so maybe there's an unpopulated header.

Yea that actually should be easy but doubt if there is an extra channel.
You can use the 3 like you thought most likely..
Just tap the gate signal off the MOSFET and feed it to a PWM to 10v analog out board going to the Vipra..

Catch is frequency, voltage (usually either 3.3 or 5v BUT this is a custom circuit) and current on that PWM MOSFET gate circuit.

2nd catch of course is the vipa is sistered to the LED zeal channel

At least all this is as I understand it..

A signal chaining port isn't much easier than hard-wiring to the MOSFET gate though more err elegant.
Has the same problems though. The chain only mates say ch 1 to another light ch1 and will dim ect as one, not as a separate unit.

NONE of this applies if the vipar is a programmable one though you could toss the entire control circuit in it and just link to those black box drivers. Need to know their dim method too..

you need a real electronics guru here. Don't even know atm how many channels each is ect..