LED Daylight Controller - A different take

[willp2]

Well my obsession with a simple LED daylight controller continues. My previous efforts at building a simple daylight controller worked well however I wanted better build quality and more options. So I took my earlier designs and combined them into one controller that can be used a number of ways.

This new version is a dimmer, daylight controller and driver for up to 24 X 3W 700mA LEDs. Additionally I added the ability to use it with other external drivers that take either a 5V or 10V PWM dimming source. The idea there is that I can build it to drive the LED’s on my nano then use the same controller to be a dimming source on that 100G I want to move into.

I can also build it as a controller only for external drivers for systems I've already retro'ed. And in fact I can use the same controller to do both at the same time. So that means I can have two or more tanks with the daylight cycle synchronized!

Once I had the design where I wanted it I wanted something cleaner than my previous wire wrap boards so I had a few PC Boards made. First PC board I’ve ever had produced so I was pleasantly surprised at how well they turned out and that I didn’t make any mistakes in the design so everything works with no modification to the board.



If you’re not familiar with my previous versions, one of my main design concepts was to keep it simple. I wanted versatility but I’m not going after an end all. I tried building a model with a real time clock, LED screen, input buttons etc. But I found that overly complex for what I wanted.

I just want to set the brightness with a knob, give some parameters for how long I want it to run, how it should ramp up and ramp down and what kind of delay should there be between the different colors on the ramp up and ramp down. For that much control I decided to just use pots for the brightness controls and a dip switch to set all the timing parameters.

Here’s the top of the board



Pots mounted to bottom



Here’s my complete unit working right now



And for reference here is an older video I put together showing the kind of control I’m talking about.

Daylight Cycle Test – Previous controller

Now unrelated to the controller is the LED fixture retro itself which I detailed here

I’ve reworked this setup several times doing different things with controllers and driver combos. In the end it got to be a huge mess inside the hood. I had everything stuffed in the hood, drivers, power supplies etc. Every inch of space was used by something.


Here's the before


So now with the new setup everything is in the one controller box so I was able to pull everything out and clean it up a lot. Basically I’m just making wire connections to the various components. I still loose style points for all the mismatched wire on LED’s themselves, but I wasn’t willing to rewire the whole thing to just to make it pretty as I know I'll be back in there again soon.

Here's the after


The LED’s have been great. They are the same high output SemiLED’s I used in earlier builds. These are the older versions, more recently I’ve been getting some different color temps, some higher power Bridgelux LEDs (10W, 30W and 50W) and am doing some testing with those units. Most interesting lately is that I can now get these 3W SemiLEDs with a 60 degree viewing angle. That’s with no optics installed. They are getting tons of PAR to the sand and very efficiently.

Here's a video explaining how it works. Caution, its a few minutes long and pretty geeked out and boring.

When I show the cycle at the end, thats simulating over 90 seconds what would normally run over a full day. In this case I do the ramp up / down in 30 seconds each. The ramp up / down doesn't show so well on the camera as its trying to compensate for the brightness changes. In practice, I get a nice gradual change where everytime I look at the tank during the ramp up / down it looks a little different. The change is subtle and happens over time.

In regular use I'm currently running a 30 minute ramp up and a 90 minute ramp down on my regular cycle. Click the pic to see the video if interested.



Daylight controller - link to video


Thanks

[customcolor]

3 works for you.....

Sick

Sick

SICK!!

ill say this....i want one

[DFason]

What type of drivers are you using?

-Dave

[willp2]

Originally Posted by customcolor

3 works for you.....

Sick

Sick

SICK!!

ill say this....i want one

Thanks! After all the time I have in this thing its nice to hear that I'm not the only one that likes it!

I'm using the little Sure Electronics drivers. I'll dig up a link if your not familiar with it.

[The Codfather]

Wow, good job. I honestly have no idea how you guys have the ability to build such things, impressive indeed.

[multicincta]

How much?

Very cool, I'm very impressed.

[willp2]

Thanks. I do have enough parts to build a couple more of these. If you are interested let me know what you are trying to do and maybe we can work something out.

[willp2]

A couple people asked me how this is controlled since it doesn't have a clock. I just use a wall timer to turn it on. Just need to make sure the wall timer is on long enough to let it run the whole cycle.

[kttran_2005]

Thanks for sharing

[noahm]

Nice!