Prototype off-road/boating spotlight - King COB!

I saw that Mechatronics IceLED Ultra elsewhere recently. It looks nice except that I have no idea how they expect you to mount that to anything since the fan doesn’t appear to have any lugs or anything on the top. I didn’t dig too deep. The heat sink is just a custom aluminum extrusion cut and sold in different lengths. I question the ability to keep a really high wattage LED cool with nothing but a slug of aluminum on it. However, I’m really trying to keep these COBs COLD for maximum performance.

Driving the CMA3090 at full output AND keeping it cool is definitely going to take some math and engineering. ~150w of heat from something that small won’t be easy unless I resort to water and an AIO.

At home, I have a B&K bench PSU that my brother gave me that I’ve been using for my shenanigans. It’s nice because it displays the current and I can measure the voltage with my Fluke. I just set the voltage to ~40vdc and then use the current limit knob. At work, we have a few really nice Agilent PSUs that I can wire in series to get quite a bit of power for testing but I haven’t done that… yet.

I’d guess you’re tripping an input current limit with the lipos but with the 9v, I bet it just can’t get enough power to work properly. Boosting up to high voltages isn’t hard. Boosting up to high voltages AND high power, is… I’ll have to look at the documentation for the Stratus LED again.

Anyway, I should have some more bits in the mail to play with this weekend.

I just realized that I got the Stratus LED and the Led Treiber Xtreme mixed up in my head.

I think the design of the IceLED is such that the fins also double as t-tracks for mounting. It’s also supposedly rated for horizontal as well as vertical use, so it’d be good for a hand cannon. Pretty much all these heat sinks are extrusions. Mechatronix has passive solutions as well, which have a sintered copper heat pipe in the center and are also rated for horizontal or vertical use. And they’re sized to neatly fit MeanWell drivers (maybe I should have gotten the cased one…

The Stratus LED site doesn’t list any input current parameters. With the 9V battery the light will flicker if I turn the dimmer pot up - but I did it more as a goof than anything. Only thing I can think of is that there’s some circuitry that is limiting output at 100W - they got these drivers specifically tuned to the Bridgelux COBs I would guess. Probably it’d work better with 4s or 6s, but I don’t have either. I do have two identical 2S batteries, but I’ll have to make a series connector for them.

Here we go… 35,500 lumens, same size as the CVM32. All we need to figure out is how to get 103.9V at 2.4A into this thing! (and it maxes out at 4.68A!)

@LouieAtienza, have you tried using a 8500 lumens 4000k R9050 COB LED:

It would be absolutely dope if I could buy one.

It would look amazing.

CXB3590 pretty well destroys those Bridgelux Vero COBs for both output and efficiency.

I won’t mess with any LEDs over about 50v. It’s just not worth the electrocution risk.

Can you post a photo of the Stratus LED board. It might be fun to study the design.

Uhh I wouldn’t really say destroying it in efficiency.

Look at the minimum lumen numbers at 85C of the CXB3590 90CRI 3500k vs Vero SE 3500k R9050:

CXB3590 4000k: 10000 lumens
Vero SE 4000k: 9771 lumens

I think though when you get to 90+CRI the efficiency goes down fast… Although supposedly not as much with the CMA3090…

As to electrocution? I’ve been zapped more than most in my lifetime. Worst was, about 20 years ago, when I co-owned a cabinet shop in an old industrial building. The wiring was really shoddy, and we had a band saw by the window next to a standpipe. It was over 100 degrees outside and I was working with my shirt off, sweating. I turned to complete a cut, and my back rested against the standpipe. I couldn’t move - I was paralyzed and shaking. If my buddy didn’t pry me off the pipe with a 2x4 I wouldn’t be here typing this I’m sure. Now, it’s almost as if electricity passes through me. When we still had rabbit ears on the TV (never had cable till about 10 years ago) I could actually improve the reception by holding the antenna - and disrupt it bys imply waving my hands around the TV. I would change a fixture without shutting off a breaker, ask someone to hand me a screwdriver, and shock them - I don’t even feel current passing through me. Maybe that’s a bad thing… A couple guys even called me Mr. AC. Should’ve called Stan Lee for his TV show.

I’m actually more afraid of playing with my CFT-90… 40A scares me more than 100V. I was swapping out the connectors on one of my LiPo batteries, because it had those barrel connectors and everything I have has XT60s. I accidentally shorted the leads with my utility knife, and watched the arc cut through the blade. That’s not fun. And that’s only a 2s battery.

And 50V DC isn’t really dangerous with dry skin.

24V DC on the tongue hurts a lot though.

The Bridgelux seems to have some headroom as it can be driven to 4.2A.

DC scares me far more than AC since DC will lock up your muscles and just fry you.

Yeah, lipos will do 2000-3000A for a millisecond or two and make connectors not exist anymore. I mainly use AS150s as they last forever and you can re-use them. Do you fly r/c? I started flying helis back around 2007 and these days you could say I’m a “drone engineer”.

I was looking at the 5000k 80cri since that’s good enough light for me. Still apples to apples, they’re just higher color temp apples.

If you only want 9k lumens, a 5000k 80cri CXB3590 will do that at 50w and 182lm/w

About 15 years ago I was involved in a car wash installation - my friend and I did the concrete, and installed the stainless steel wall panels and interior trim. Got the job from an electrician friend. He was hooking up the main panel, which was something like 480V, 3-phase. He accidentally grounded the screwdriver. I saw the entire shank basically sublimate before our eyes. Pretty scary stuff!

My brother and I fly used to be into drones; but it’s a lot easier to just buy them now than build one and pray it doesn’t come down in a fiery crash. DJI makes drones far better than my brother and I so that’s what we fly now. Cheaper than the trial-and-error approach. So have a bunch of these LiPos laying around and I nurse them like pet rocks, so might as well put them to use.

80CRI is good enough for me; but I do normally prefer a whiter white.

I don’t think I’ll be satisfied with only 9000 lumens however.

Have you seen this liquid cooled COB project?

Seen that for a while now… Not sure if I want to go the liquid cooled route, but not ruling it out.

The thing is, it may use 1600W of power, but it’s using inefficient low binned Chinese COBs that can only output 6000 lumens at 100W, and it’s not taking into consideration the inefficiency of using such a lens design vs a reflector/large TIR.

Meaning, rather than outputting 160k lumens, it’s outputting 96 000 lumens at most with perfect optics.

I think it’s cooler to have a single high-power COB cranked to the max in a portable format than 16 underperforming cheap COBs other than to pose. Now, if each one was individually addressable with something like Raspberry Pi, and he could do light patterns/individual dimming, THAT would have been cool.

Heh. I hate DJI. My latest aircraft outperforms almost everything else out there but it isn’t cheap… or small.

A friend of mine flies a heli I designed for him and he gets work others can’t because he doesn’t have a DJI. It also doesn’t hurt that he flies with an A7R and a Black Magic Cinema 4k.

The focus of the video really was the water cooling solution for the heat… :wink:

Yeah, I just don’t have the time I used to for making a frame, buying all the components, testing and assembling, testing some more, etc. I’m not the biggest DJI fan but I spend more time now flying than at my bench. One day I’ll get back into it.

Also, being within 20 miles from four airports, one international, means I have to travel far to fly a big drone. On the contrary, I send my Mavic Pro on stealth missions quite regularly LOLOL… now if only it could lift my COB cannon…

Yeah it remains an option, but for me with a single COB it’s probably overkill. Heck even with his setup, he could have taken four heatsink extrusions and two large fans, and it’d probably cooled better. Also just because he puts 16 100W COB LED modules, doesn’t mean he’s pulling 1600W of power. Judging from the video alone, my AceBeam X80 looks just as bright, at least for 1 minute, and I can hold it easily with one hand. Now if I could just install water-cooling on that!

Just saying that radiator does not look like it would dissipate all that heat for too long before his cooling system gets overwhelmed.