I am refurbishing a Light Monkey canister light for diving.
It has a 26W LED light head.
The LED is toast (SST-90-W65S) and I have ordered new ones (SFH55) that should fit in the existing mechanics.
I thought I could re-use the driver, but it’s half molded in and I am not sure it survived me trying to get the mold off - so now when it’s all taken apart I’d actually rather replace it than trying to refurbish it.
Light Monkey says it’s gone obsolete and they can’t provide the spare part.
I am thinking to drive the new LED pretty much like the old one; constant current in the range of 8A to 9A.
There’s a mechanical ON/OFF switch and that’s fine to keep that way, I don’t need dimming etc.
The original driver is on aluminum PCB and only has parts published on the top side and it sits in a 32 mm milled hole in an aluminum block inside the head.
Hi Southerncomfort, I broke off a chip capacitor and the inductor took a beating, but yeah I might be able to reuse it still. I’d prefer to replace it with a new one though, unless it’s too much of a hassle.
I must say that 12V input drivers seem to be hard to find nowadays–Convoy doesn’t have any as far as I know. I would browse this page to see if there’s a driver you like:
I had a look through the page, and all of the 12V to 3V drivers are too low-power, maxing out at 3V 3A output. Two of the 12V-to-6V drivers are powerful enough to worth a look, so you might want to change to a 6V LED.
If all fails, at the end of the day there is always the option to resistor-drive a 12V LED like the high CRI GT-FC40.
Thanks heaps for input!
A resistor solution and a 12V LED may be a solution too. I guess it would be fairly easy to mount an aluminium resistor instead of the driver, I’d have to do some math on that though.
You can use convoy 8A or 10A buck driver for 3v led with dc-dc stepdown converter on input side which convert 12 volts to 4.2 volts .
Of course dc-dc converter is not small pcb and it need cooling, but it may work in this way if You don’t find suitable driver.
