50W RGB LED Stage lighting

50W LED stage lighting Project. The photo above show some of the effect with only 9 LED units giving color to the stage and 18 LED light boxes give texture/effect to the background.  This artical will cover the process I went through creating the 50W LED units.   LED Bulb Current Limiter DMX Decoder Cooling & Lens Power Source Casing & Mounting Schematics Parts List & Sources   Lets start with the LED; I ordered mine from Ebay: LED-QUEEN. I’ve had good results from them. Now this is a 50W bulb or 16.6667W per color. The data given on the bulb was 22-24V for RED @ 600mA and 32-34V on Blue and Green @ 600mA. So lets take a look at what this means. Volts*Amps = Watts RED: 24*0.6 = 14.4W GREEN: 34*0.6 = 20.4W BLUE: 34*0.6 = 20.4W Total Watts = 55.2W This may not seem like much but even just 5.2W over could damage the bulb. So how did this data apply to actual usage? It didn’t really. I found that the Red was well over 1amp trying to use the full 24 volts. With similar results on the green and blue at 34 volts. Pushing well over 70-80W through a 50W bulb lets the smoke out. Always measure when testing and to extended run tests. let the unit stay on for over an hour. Or  else you might think that it works. but it dies quickly and blame the product and never realized it was your fault, cause pushing anything 50% or more over its rating will burn it out fast. The Real Data: In testing I found that running the Red at 18V I would get about 900mA of current; thats 16.1W. And at 26.5V on the green and blue i was getting 700mA or 15.9W. Also note that I’m using a current limiter(see Next Section), this is because when LEDs heat up they consume more power, so if you don’t limit the current you will ruin them or your power supply very fast.  I’ve been using this simple constant current circuit for all my high power LED projects by Dan Goldwater. (I won’t be covering the process on how I etched my PCB as there are several tutorials and videos on the process, sorry. But I did include a link to the kit I used under the “Parts & Sources Section” ) Using the data from the LED seller as a starting point, I began testing the LED to see how it would perform. This new data helped me in fine tuning the circuit for a more  balanced operation. First: RED, when using a 24 volts power source I would lose almost 6 watts in heat just from dropping down to 18 volts. I set R3 to 0.5 ohms for a 900mA limit and changed my input voltage to 20 volts. This lowered the heat lost and allowed me to continue using the smaller MOSFET I borrowed from the DMX-Decoders(A Cost Savings of $40+) MOSFETs are expensive. Next: GREEN & BLUE, using a similar technique from RED; I lowered my input voltage...

DMX lighting Console

Currently building a DMX lighting console base on the Raspberry Pi B+ and QLC+ (software). QLC+ was created by Massimo and you can find his work here: http://qlcplus.sourceforge.net/ It’s been hard to find the information I needed to make this happen, so I hope the information I’ve collected will help you in your future protects.   Photos and more details to come.

Stage LED lighting project- RGB Box

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