15,000 Lumen Bridgelux C9000 Light Engine

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More reserved…

Uhhh! I can't wait for the next update. This will be epic. Mwuhahaha!

This gives true meaning to the phrase

“Let there be light”

Good luck with the reflector. When its done, make sure you use the same eye protection that the folks were using to witness the recent total eclipse in northern Australia before powering it up :slight_smile:

Looking forward for more tests. That is one badass LED!
Nice man!

Texas, you should sell kits with the modded power supply and a heatsink. I would certainly get one. :D

So much light it should have a sound effect each time it turns on.

I bought some of those SST-90 reflectors from Illumination Machines (http://www.illuminationmachines.com/products.php?id=9&catId=1). Hopefully the back end can be opened up enough to fit the 32mm diam Bridgelux emitter circle.

I also have some of the Ledil reflectors built just for the Bridgelux, but they are 24 degree beam width.

Hmm... If their specs are right at 46cd/lumen wouldn't this thing do something like 690kcd? :evil:

I’m not sure that I like that copper heatsink that I am using. It is nice and compact and works VERY well, but the fins are short and closely spaced. That requires high pressure air to get in there. The fan on it is a screamer and is recessed into the fins. I would like to build the engine up with a single fan that can provide air to both the LED and the driver.

I am planing on building a small board that fits on the back of the driver. It will have the ACS712 current sensor and an AVR (ATMEGA328?) that controls everything. It would have a FET for switching power to the driver, one for PWMing the fan, and one for PWMing the LED. Parasitic drain on the battery should be around 20 uA. Dimming via a button or pot. It would also monitor the battery, etc.

And something tells me this thing will make an awesome puke light J)

When I was setting up the constant current mod, I had the current level set at around 2A. That is below the minimum level that the circuit wants to work at. The thing started flickering some. I went to crank up the drive level, but turned the pot the wrong way. Then it REALLY started flickering. The effect was rather awesome, even though it was only doing 5000 lumens at the time and the LED was shining into my sphere.

Now this will be really a lot of light! I'm curious how it will perform with SST-90 reflector.

How about a quick write-up on the conversions you made to the DC-DC converter?

My Bridgelux RS array arrived today. Only around 6600lm max so it’s just a baby compared to your C9000. Waiting for the power components to arrive…

It makes the sun squint… 8)

wow, would buy custom made with this inside :o

Search Ebay for “600W DC-DC” There are some $20 DC-DC converter modules that are already constant current capable. They can output up to 80V (drive two C9000’s in series?) and they claim to by 95% efficient. I have a couple on order… http://www.ebay.com/itm/DC-DC-600W-10-60V-to-12-80V-Boost-Converter-Step-up-Module-Power-Supply-/170893208817?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item27ca076cf1

:heart_eyes:

I kludged up an external PWM dimmer onto the constant current driver… it failed miserably. Any dimming caused the LED to go into puke-flicker mode. Turns out that the stock program in the dimmer is PWMing at 100 Hz… way too slow to maintain a stable output. The constant current driver has a 1000 uF output cap, which 5A of current significantly drains between 10 millisecond PWM pulses.

I need to reprogram that dimmer chip for something like 10 kHz PWM…

I think that spec is only for an SST-90. Perhaps if you could get 15k lumens from an SST-90 sized emitter you’d be able to get that kind of throw, but the array is freaking huge. I expect closer to 100kcd, given that the bare emitter already gives off 15kcd.

I tweaked the dimmer firmware to do 32 kHz PWM. The driver behaves a bit better, but still messes up below around 35%. I tried adding a bigger cap (another 1000 uF) across the driver output… it just made things worse. I need to see what happens if I shorten and clean up all the external wiring… and maybe reduce the output cap on the driver.

I did manage to blow the switching FET in the driver by pulling around 220 watts out of it (maybe 19,250 lumens). I replaced it with an IRF3036 (2 milliohm, 190 amp rating, the original FET was 10 milliohm, 75 amp). I was expecting to see some decent improvement in the driver efficiency, but it was minimal.