DIY leds Discussion Thread for all your how tos and doubts and anything related

[Rocket Soul]

Yea, it gets easier with practice but a single unit just has no economy of scale. To that day and a half add research/calculations to know what you want and then half a day of troubleshooting after it's done.

I got myself a GLA. Couldn't have done it better myself since good UV diodes are difficult to source.

Do you know where to source good 400 nm (ish) UV diodes (bare, not mounted)? I contemplate to DIY something for my fish tank.


At my scale I'm not sure if 3 % are really worth pursuing. Stop using seeds and "pheno hunt" myself a productive strain would be a better payoff. Or many other things I didn't optimize yet.

Theres stuff on alibaba and aliexpress that id rate as good enough. Talked about it with pcbuds the other day: https://www.icmag.com/threads/pcbuds-mini-grow.360815/post-18794714

Not allowed to give links to any of the alibubbers but if you look around aliexpress you almost find any nm, both mounted and unmounted. Modern uvs are mostly good enough.
The regular global distrubtors would work well: digikey, arrow electronics, mouser
I usually do alibaba but rhats like atleast 30$ in shipping so not worth it for a small order; hence aliexpress. TME in europe carries prolightopto who are very good aswell, and a bunch of cheapo brands.
GLA are excellent, strips or boards? We got the strips and been very happy with them. Have two other light fixtures with similar spectrum which also do well and me and my growbuddy never seem to agree which ones is best; sometimes it depends on the strain.

3% was just a number drawn thru the air, what you could get by optimizing spread in a ways you dont get with standard lighting.

 

[Orange's Greenhouse]

Theres stuff on alibaba and aliexpress that id rate as good enough. Talked about it with pcbuds the other day: https://www.icmag.com/threads/pcbuds-mini-grow.360815/post-18794714

Not allowed to give links to any of the alibubbers but if you look around aliexpress you almost find any nm, both mounted and unmounted. Modern uvs are mostly good enough.
The regular global distrubtors would work well: digikey, arrow electronics, mouser
I usually do alibaba but rhats like atleast 30$ in shipping so not worth it for a small order; hence aliexpress. TME in europe carries prolightopto who are very good aswell, and a bunch of cheapo brands.
GLA are excellent, strips or boards? We got the strips and been very happy with them. Have two other light fixtures with similar spectrum which also do well and me and my growbuddy never seem to agree which ones is best; sometimes it depends on the strain.

3% was just a number drawn thru the air, what you could get by optimizing spread in a ways you dont get with standard lighting.

I have the board. I don't see much benefit in the strips unless you need that specific form factor. Your build just spreads them even if I remember correctly? A board can get a similiar output but is much easier to handle. If you were to give yourself a realistic wage it would come to the same cost.

With the chinese diodes I'm not too confident that their wavelength binning is correct. Calibrating for luminous flux differences is simple to do at home (if wavelength is compareable) but I just don't have a spectrometer at home.

I just wanted to say, that I got something else that is easier to optimize than lighting. A proper strain gets me 20 % more productivity. A better light takes proper testing and might yield 3 % which is worth it at scale.

 

[Orange's Greenhouse]

But to get back on topic. @Prawn Connery proposed the idea of using strip light to build a vertical light setup.



I did some sketching and rough calculations. Given his numbers the idea is to light a 4x4 tent. The light is in the middle and 1 m high. The plants are 0,3 m from the lights, giving them 0,3 m of depth which should be sufficient for growth and ventilation. A traditionally lit 4x4 canopy is ~1.5 m². The vertical setup would yield (assuming 1,2 m is lit) 2.25 m² or 50 % more.

To light 2.25 m² at 900 µmol/(m²*s) you need a light with 2025 µmol/s. With a system efficiency of say 2.6 µmol/J that's 778 W.

You can use 6 strips per section and two sections high for a total of 12 strips. That's 64 W per strip. Which is a bit high but could be done if desired. More on that later.



Here is a mockup of how that could be assembled. The strips are roughly looking like the GLA branded ones and critical dimensions are correct. The idea is to have fittings that hold the strips in a hexagon shape. In the middle are hexagon brackets to provide additional support (only one is shown but multiple would be used). The bottom fitting provides an adaptor for an inline fan. This provides forced convection and is essential to remove heat. Above this module would be another set of strips to get to the desired height. Cable management is left as an exercise to the reader.

At the high wattage heat sinks would be necessary. The problem here is that heat sinks cost money and take time to assemble. I have seen some nice heat sinks that can be cut to size, are small (40 or 50 mm wide and 6 mm think) but cost >100 €/m, adding additional cost. Assembly gets more involved too.

Alternatively it would be easier to increase the strip count to 10 per section, 20 total. This is 39 W per strip which is ok with forced convection and increases the diameter of the module from ~110 mm to ~180 mm. Price would be the same because no heat sinks are required.

 

[Rocket Soul]

But to get back on topic. @Prawn Connery proposed the idea of using strip light to build a vertical light setup.



I did some sketching and rough calculations. Given his numbers the idea is to light a 4x4 tent. The light is in the middle and 1 m high. The plants are 0,3 m from the lights, giving them 0,3 m of depth which should be sufficient for growth and ventilation. A traditionally lit 4x4 canopy is ~1.5 m². The vertical setup would yield (assuming 1,2 m is lit) 2.25 m² or 50 % more.

To light 2.25 m² at 900 µmol/(m²*s) you need a light with 2025 µmol/s. With a system efficiency of say 2.6 µmol/J that's 778 W.

You can use 6 strips per section and two sections high for a total of 12 strips. That's 64 W per strip. Which is a bit high but could be done if desired. More on that later.



Here is a mockup of how that could be assembled. The strips are roughly looking like the GLA branded ones and critical dimensions are correct. The idea is to have fittings that hold the strips in a hexagon shape. In the middle are hexagon brackets to provide additional support (only one is shown but multiple would be used). The bottom fitting provides an adaptor for an inline fan. This provides forced convection and is essential to remove heat. Above this module would be another set of strips to get to the desired height. Cable management is left as an exercise to the reader.

View attachment 19091266

View attachment 19091267



At the high wattage heat sinks would be necessary. The problem here is that heat sinks cost money and take time to assemble. I have seen some nice heat sinks that can be cut to size, are small (40 or 50 mm wide and 6 mm think) but cost >100 €/m, adding additional cost. Assembly gets more involved too.

Alternatively it would be easier to increase the strip count to 10 per section, 20 total. This is 39 W per strip which is ok with forced convection and increases the diameter of the module from ~110 mm to ~180 mm. Price would be the same because no heat sinks are required.

I think i saw @Scfarmer with similar ideas and ill admitt that ive also dabbled with the idea. I think i did some looking around and found it very hard to find any hexagonal tubing at anything but huge prices. Went with the idea to use square which i could find but one problem remains of access to the inside of the tube: whos skinny baby hands and arms reaches inside to attach the screws inside? Youd probably best of having some type of dummy test before getting the tubing. And youre likely needing one very anorectic girlfriend for this.
The benefit of a design like this is oblivious, you could extract air thru it making cooling the strips and renewing the air all in one go. But it would mean always extracting the bottom. Another similar approach would using 4x "lipped" heatsinks (i think the glas sinks come like that, and making holes in lip and finn and attach with screw and nuts. But seems a bit of a big project with lots of costs: 4 boards per per 40cm section.

My GLA light; im not sure i posted it here yet but it is up somewhere on RIU; yes it was more or less even distribution- a little closer on the last couple of heatsinks i think to get that even spread. I did mess that one up a bit, initially i had the strips the wrong way, lol.
The whole point of strips in that build was
1: my grow buddies preference
2 :access to fitted heatsinks locally thru t-slot
3 : boards need a bit higher hanging height, in openspace this can hamper you with light losses on walls.

Boards have a slightly different spectrum aswell, more fullcycle than the boards. They do great in our vegg aswell but should really replace that with a dedicated veg light: 8 of those strips to light one tray of vegg at 150w seems wasteful to me. It just came about that way during a refit and we went with it to try. Always try to put special cuts under it and you can see a slight better health under them than our standard 5k+ 660 veg light.

 

[Rocket Soul]

I have the board. I don't see much benefit in the strips unless you need that specific form factor. Your build just spreads them even if I remember correctly? A board can get a similiar output but is much easier to handle. If you were to give yourself a realistic wage it would come to the same cost.

With the chinese diodes I'm not too confident that their wavelength binning is correct. Calibrating for luminous flux differences is simple to do at home (if wavelength is compareable) but I just don't have a spectrometer at home.

I just wanted to say, that I got something else that is easier to optimize than lighting. A proper strain gets me 20 % more productivity. A better light takes proper testing and might yield 3 % which is worth it at scale.

If you optimize both you get 23 i just meant that for that perfect even spread which in the end can give you some decimals diy is the way to go. And getting it right WILL make you feel awesome- building and repairing is just such a kick. My proudest moment of this year was first crashing and breaking my projector, damning myself, only to figure out it was optic related and opening that sucker up and to my own great surprise managing to fix it! In one fell swoop i scored every last man point and beamed like a little sun for a week. Getting your own light perfect is the growers version of this: every single crop and record you break will only renew that feeling. Its that "smells like victory"-feeling from apocalypse now, lol, beating the world at its own game by just bending it to your will, just using a drill, saw and a screwdriver

Inexact binning in china would not surprise me; my guess is that a lot of diodes rejected for being somewhat off spec in cct would go to lights in the past. In my latest project it seems like the supplier is sourcing thru the globals, digikey/arrow etc rather than some fly by night china operation.
The amount of cooperation and patience ive had recently may be indicative on a slowdown in the industry and in general in china: alibaba negotiations used to be very to the point before: "you buy now?"-like rather than really trying to get you what you want in your heart-of-custom-heart.

 

[Rocket Soul]

It would be really cool to get an idea what people would do for a 1m2 tent with diy; finding the right solution seems hard. Some would say strips, some may say boards. What do you diy minded guys say? Candidates for even spread seems to preclude 2 foot strips unless you want to put a bunch in the middle or make something with both, middlestrips and strips around a square frame. Who has a go to design here which both gives even spread and doesnt eat up too much vertical space? I got some suggestions but its nice to hear from everybody...

 

[led05]

Any build pics & finished results?

Here’s a 500w one I did, I’ve done so many now I’ve lost count (25+) & even started selling some off, it’s addicting building them

 

[Rocket Soul]

Any build pics & finished results?

Here’s a 500w one I did, I’ve done so many now I’ve lost count (25+) & even started selling some off, it’s addicting building them

View attachment 19091284

This is really nice! The other thread is dedicated to builds and buds results, this one is open for anything diy discussion jibber jabber; want to keep the other on subject, with this thread to divert any discussion going beyond the actual builds/buds. But maybe some info on components, what space your running it in? Cool to see builds with cobs still nowadays
Build and bud thread: https://www.icmag.com/threads/diy-led-growlights-builds-and-results.18131610/

And check out the poll aswell here in this thread