I’m trying to find some driver options for a project i started about a year and a half ago and had to table. I’m sitting here at work so I don’t have any pictures to help clear up the following descriptions, but I’ll try to post some later. basically this is a multiple LED submergable fishing light. My prototype used 24 1W bright with LEDs on heat sync pucks. 3 LED’s to a cat4101 driver. The LEDs were mounted to a square aluminum tube with .125” walls this tube was to be placed inside an acrylic tube. The end caps I had CNC cut to fit the square tube that wy the ends would protrude from the device. This would allow water to flow freely through the middle of the light, effectivley water cooling my LEDs. I ran into so many troubles with this.
First there are no readily available acrylic or pvc or other caps that fit snugly over the end of the tube making my only option nearly impossible to adequatley seal to make it water tight.
The second problem is that cat4101 drivers require a secondary power source. As low as 3V and no higher than 5V. This meant I had to find a battery pack to attach to this whole thing.
The biggest problem I had was that I tried to design this where the drivers sat up top where the battery clips are. this meants that I had a positive and a negative wire for 8 sets of LEDs running the length of about 12 feet that I had to stuff into heatshrink tubing then shrink. BTW this was a three hour process.
My last problem is that my light will certainly survive being submerged about a foot in a kiddy pool but I seriously doubt this light would have any longjevity if it was to actually be used in a boating environment.
My second prototype design (still on paper) has dealt with these issues. But this time out I want to use a different kind of driver that doesn’t require a secondary power source to operate. And that I can mount inside the tube on the aluminum pipe.
So the million dollar question is… Does anybody know of any drivers that will safely operate 3 or more 1W to 3W LEDs on a 12V car battery. Or maybe even if you know of any options that would handle all the way up to 10W LEDs like the XM-L.
Information about the drivers would be really helpful.