My diy led build using arduino controller

[mark sid tottle]

Hi everyone,

I hope i have posted in the correct place? I been following and reading a lot of stuff on this site and have been vefy impressed with it all. Nearly a year ago I decided to have a go at building my very own leds for my reef tank. I have shared my build with anofher forum I am registered to and have good feed back and help along the way. Im looking to share it here with you guys.
I hope to hear back from you all in regards to me sharing my build. :angel:

 

[heathd.hd]

Nice to have u bud! I'm using reef angel as a controller so I'll be following!

 

[mark sid tottle]

Tanks for your reply, is there any way of editing the thread title as I have missed out something?

 

[heathd.hd]

Not unless your a supporting member. The mods for the threads are also able to edit. Sorry

 

[heathd.hd]

If you private msg revhtree he is the main man he can!

 

[mark sid tottle]

oh well never mind, I'll leave it.

i have been building a diy led unit for my tank. I have had my leds running for since august this year(2014). I have been thinking about sharing my build with this forum as well to seewhat people think of it. Decided what the heck. so any feed back is very much appreciated. I will be posting more pictures of the tank and how I have decided how to build the led and led choice.
the first few picture show the power supply lay out and some drivers, and some dc-dc step down converters, i am using some arduino parts, and running jarduino software to control it all.

 

[zesty]

Excellent, can't wait to see the rest!

 

[mark sid tottle]

With my diy led build I wanted to stick to a budget, not the easiest to do I know, but with my tank being nearly to 2ft deep i needed a lot of power for my money. I decided on using 10w leds @ 9-12v amd 1000ma. The next step was to have a look at the market and see what colour were being used, and there is a lot of colours but my choices were limited with using 10w leds but was able to find what I wanted. For the whites i went with 16000k, and royal blue and then some uv voilet 420nm 3w leds.
Using the jarduino code to run my leds I have used jarduino build as base for my build.

here is the shopping list of pretty much everything I needed.

4- 10w drivers 1626ma
1- 1w driver 333ma
2- DC-DC Step-Down Adjustable Converter
2- 120mm pwm arctic cooling fans
1- 36V 10A 360W DC Regulated Switching LED Power Supply
1- ardunio set up (mega 2560, mega shield, 3.2tft touch)
4- DS18B20 Waterproof temp sensors
12- 16000k 9-12v white leds 900ma
12- royal blue 9-12v 1000ma
4- 3w violet 420nm 3.0-3.6v 700ma
1- IEC320 C14 Power Socket AC 250V 10A w Fuse Holder Black Red
BC549C Multicomp Transistor, NPN, To-92
2- 15 Way Male D-Sub Connector
2- 15 Way feMale D-Sub Connector
1- M-F 40-Pin IDE Male to Female Extension Cable 8 inches
1- 3.2" TFT LCD module PCB touch display Black screen Bezel
24- Base and 44mm lens 90 deg degree for 10w LED
4- LED Lens 90 Degree Reflector For 3W
2- 300x140x20 mm Aluminium Heatsink

In the beginning i found myself being a little impatient and rushing to buy stuff, as you can see in the shopping list that the drivers do match the 10w leds, but the current is far to much, if anything I needed to limit the current on the drivers to suit the 1000ma current draw for the leds. After scratching my head and speaking to people from work I was able to find some circuit diagrams for the all driver that sure electronics do(high power led driver le-ll series) and we found something very useful after studying the 10w driver and the 3w driver diagrams it was clear that the 10w driver are two 3w driver jumped together, result for me this mean that I can separate the drivers to get a better match for the leds. Plus it saves me money not having to re-buy stuff. The current draw from doing is now limited to 826ma.

 

[mark sid tottle]

This is the screen with the code loaded onto it.

 

[TJ's Reef]

Very impressive so far so will hang out and wait for more updates.... :couch2:

I'm a avid DIYer myself and also built my own LED array along with many other things as can be seen in my build thread linked in my signature below.

Cheers, Todd

 

[mark sid tottle]

Here is a problem I came across when I started my build.

Having listed my shopping list yesterday I noticed that the 3w violet leds are 700ma well I definitely missed that as I thought they were around 350ma, the driver I am planning on using for this led is the 1w 333ma driver. that is clearly not good :banghead: well today I've spent around 5 hours thinking about how am I going to fix this mess up I have made, but fix it I did :dance:
In my last post I touched on that the 10w 1626ma driver is actually to 3w 816ma jumped to together, luckily I have a few 10w drivers spare, so I started to turn the 10w driver into 3w driver and got to work looking to see what I could do to lower the ma rating to about 700ma for the uv violet leds, I made a small setup with a 3w driver and 10w 1000ma led, the reason for the use of the 10w 1000ma led is due to the fact there was no way I could blow it during this test, oh plus rid up my multimeter to measure the current. on the 3w driver there are 3 resistors, 2 are of the same value and the third is different. I made the decision to remove the odd resistor. As on the 1w driver there is only 1 resistor which is a R300 seeing as the 3w driver has 2 of these it was a good starting point. well turns out it was a very good starting point as when I measured the current it was just under 700ma happy days.


I've posted some pictures to show what i have been trying to explain.

 

[760mason]

nice doing a project myself right now..following on this one

 

[TJ's Reef]

Very clean work Mark, so nice doing your own work and really understanding the working schematics of the project at hand.

Cheers, Todd

 

[Bombertech]

Nice enclosure, are you leaving it open or doing Active/Passive cooling?

 

[mark sid tottle]

I have had a few issues with this build so far but to my own doings due to what I wanted to achieve but sometimes we don't all get happy ends :'(.......... but none the less i am still very happy with what I have done and what is still to do.


The idea was to have the touch screen built into a new hood/canopy (which would be about 6ft away) that I am building for the tank and have the arduino housed in a box with every thing else ).............. your all probably all thinking that is a crazy idea and why would you even try and attempt it.

But sad to say I never could get it working.

keen to find out way nothing was working I got asking around turns out that the parallel data bus is a little sensitive to noise and picks up all sorts and that length and there doesn't seem to be anything I can do, unless you convert it a serial data bus at the arduino and then when get to the screen convert it back into parallel data bus. that may work but.

 

[mark sid tottle]

Nice enclosure, are you leaving it open or doing Active/Passive cooling?

The enclosure is closed and has a fan for cooling.
As I post more and show you all what I have done in this build, if I was to build another there are thing I would of done different.

 

[mark sid tottle]

seeing as my crazy plan to move my screen failed i needed to look elsewhere to house the screen, so to keep it simple it is going in box with everything else. From the first post with picture you can see that there is not much room left to put anything well the only way is up and up we shall go. you can see that there are 4 stand offs that are now fitted this is going to hold the arduino 2560 mega

and the mega shield and it fit very nice as you can see.

 

[mark sid tottle]

In this build i have decided to build 2 sets of heat sinks with equal leds on both and will be pretty much the same lay out on each.
Next in the build process I needed to build some circuits for the temp sensors that will be going in, 2 are the the 2 heat sinks and 1 for the tank and the other is going to go in the sump, and the other circuit that needs building is the pwm control the fans on the heat sinks.

With the arduino mega 2560 the are a number of pwm connections that control leds to pwm fans, next I needed to find a good clean way of attaching the wires to keep it all tidy. This is want I did
.

 

[captainsaquarium]

This is one of the better builds I have seen for sure. Did you figure out exactly how you will mount the screen display yet?

 

[mark sid tottle]

I have. But you will all see as the build goes on. Don't forget the build has been up and running for nearly 3 months now.