RE: Blog #3: LED Life Booster/Extender

Gough Lui — Sun, 27 Mar 2022 22:18:06 GMT

Hmm. It seems your LED panels have been mounted to the thermal switch and not to any real heatsink which sort of defeats the purpose of maximising the LED's lifetime. In such a scenario, I would expect the LEDs to run much hotter than they absolutely have to - the zip-tie may not last all that long either and then if the thermal switch falls off the LED MCPCB, it may falsely read a low temperature at all times.

It also seems your first diagram has "Thermal Switch 2" written twice!

However, the brightness logic is also interesting - in case both panels are hot, you suddenly decide to run both at 50% which means that if an existing panel is already hot and throttled back to 40%, it would then have to increase its output to 50% thus warming it up more. Perhaps putting both to 40% and dealing with a small loss of light output is more sensible. But as a demonstration of thermal switch behvaiour, that is fine - it just doesn't seem all that practical as a real-life application as the cost could have been spent on better heatsinking/more LEDs to share the current.

An interesting outcome nevertheless ...

- Gough

RE: Blog #3: LED Life Booster/Extender

DAB — Sun, 27 Mar 2022 17:59:24 GMT

Nice experiment.

RE: Blog #3: LED Life Booster/Extender

navadeepganeshu — Sun, 27 Mar 2022 17:09:24 GMT

That's a nice demo, [mention:be8e07385afe4f4ab960fa2baba6372b:e9ed411860ed4f2ba0265705b8793d05]! Liked the way you implemented the logic on Arduino code.

Could use some type of thermally conductive adhesives/paste for enhancing the thermal input to the sensor in the LED module.