RE: TI and Würth Elektronik LED RoadTest+ - Circuit Crafting - 8/10

dougw — Sun, 10 Jan 2016 17:22:31 GMT

Hi Antony,

Aesthetically a very nice looking design and good work on successfully etching the traces. As you have realized, this design imposes significant limitations on how much current can be used, but it will still look very cool.

Here are some references that might help figure out how much power your design can handle:

http://focus.ti.com/download/trng/docs/seminar/Topic%2010%20-%20Thermal%20Design%20Consideration%20for%20Surface%20Mount…

Thermal Vias – A Packaging Engineer’s Best Friend « Electronics Cooling Magazine – Focused on Thermal Management, TIMs…

It takes a lot of work to accurately figure out ,but you can quickly get a rough estimate for how much power your design can handle. If this is satisfactory, you can do a test to see exactly how much power is possible. Simply populate the card and slowly increase current until the LEDs get to a maximum safe temperature.

Doug

RE: TI and Würth Elektronik LED RoadTest+ - Circuit Crafting - 8/10

shabaz — Sun, 10 Jan 2016 14:28:01 GMT

Hi Antony,

I'd hate for you to solder on all those LEDs, and then find out, but have you checked what heatsinking requirements are needed?

If these are LEDs with 350mA or higher current consumption, then there will be a _lot_ of heat produced, normally needs a large aluminium heatsink for all those LEDs. This type of PCB is not a good conductor for heat, so it will be difficult to mount it in this manner. So, worth thinking about the heat considerations first (I don't have an answer, because it depends on what you have available. You can see [mention:193ac2434c814a24b46635a2210baec1:e9ed411860ed4f2ba0265705b8793d05] implementation, using a MCPCB (metal core PCB). Personally I would try to get those if you can, or something similar,