Posted on 09/07/2010 12:00:42 PM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
The first question some may ask is “Why?” Those of us who are LED addicts say “Why the hell not?” This guy literally took 500 bright white LEDs and created his own giant 50W flashlight. While it may have been just ever so slightly overkill, it’s still an impressive build. Can you imagine soldering all of those 500 LEDs?!
****************************************************************************
Youtube Video of the Construction and Demostration at the website....
***********************************************************************************
As you can tell in the video above, it has an absurd amount of controls for various brightness settings. Heck, it could even be a non-lethal weapon as it would temporarily blind any bad guys. Check out all of our DIY lighting projects including some related projects below:
(Excerpt) Read more at hacknmod.com ...
LED's don't generate that much heat.
What’s the guy planning on doing with it? Blinding someone? Heheh.
If he wanted a 50watt LED flashlight why would he bother using extremely low power LEDs? 50 watt leds are available. They’re actually about 50 1 watt leds on one chip.
http://cgi.ebay.com/1-PC-50W-WATT-HIGH-POWER-WHITE-LED-Light-Lamp-4000Lm-/120587276035?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item1c138fcf03
50 Watt, 4000 lumens, $60
-PJ
So what is that?
and lives in his mother's basement??
That’s 1500 lumens less than the average commercially available standard glove box flashlight.
he would need a heat sink though.
4.5 amps of power? Doubt it.
Thanks,...very interesting.
See #23.
It leverages the fact that the LED is a diode, not a bulb. The circuit uses a transistor and a transformer to send pulses through the LED (about 50,000 per second) to essentially blink the LED instead of lighting it continuously. This allows the LED to light using less than 1V in a AA battery, instead of the normal 3.2V to light a LED.
It's calleda Joule Thief because, when most electronics consider a 1.5V battery to be dead at around 1.2V, this circuit will light an LED down to about 0.8V before the light becomes useless.
-PJ
See #23....not that is some serious light.
Could he reduce his power by hooking up a Joule Thief circuit (see my post 33)?
-PJ
Typo correction.
Well, I’m guessing that casing is aluminum? That should disperse any heat, maybe? Most casings of LED lights, the 3 x 1w ones with the e27 base, have aluminum casings to deal with the heat. That’s 3 watts vs 50 watts.
http://cgi.ebay.com/E27-White-3-LED-Bulb-Light-Lamp-Spotlight-3W-110-240V-/270625215583?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item3f0285145f
3 watts, e27, $6
there are tons of them just like that on ebay, and they all have aluminum casings to deal with the heat.
really neat.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.