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Yes. There are ways to control 2 leds with 1 driver. But if there is a driver failure? I was thinking more for redundancy.
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In my experience, driver failure is very rare. most caving light failures are in the wire and contacts or due to water entering the body. so unless you are planning to use 2 battery case, 2 power wires and two independant section of the body you don’t really have redundancy
IMHO it is better to carry 2 or 3 (as much compact as possible) lights than having one (probably big and heavy) light with redundancy.
Are you building your own case too? Or using an existing? I’m definitely interested in dual LED cases if they are not bulky.
+1. Carry an extra light instead. Then you have full 100% redundancy. If doing SRT or anything else that requires two hands underground I’ll always bring a spare headlamp.
Have a look at the Digisparks. 2-3 models, usb programmable, minimalist design with a bunch of stuff already wired up. About the size of a small postage stamp.
Got a few on order for some doodads I want to build (vs dedicated hardware).
Good morning guys.
Talking about drivers. Can I use this circuit as a driver for the Cree XM-L2 U3s? Is this how you did it in your projects Mike?
Dont think about the Vin/Battery, just the overall circuit. The circuit will be duplicated for the second XM-L2. PWM signal will come form the D5 pin on the microcontroller.
Its 8x AMC7135s btw. 8x 350mA = 2.8Amps for the XM-L2s
Yes, the reason I want to use the Atmega328 is because of all the IOs and because I have worked with Arduino before. But if you have a good alternative, please let me know
Kind of. I didn’t PWM the entire range of 7135. I split them up in groups so I could have any number of them on, and only used PWM on one of the 7135s. That’s just me though, most have done like you, all 7135s on the same channel. Easiest that way.
I use the ATtiny1634. It has 17 usable IOs and 16KB flash. It’s more than adequate for my usage.
I have had a quick look, but when it comes to CNC production it is much more costly than PCB production. The amount of changes and new versions I’ve gone through in regards to driver PCBs is scary enough, going though the same process for CNC will render me broke. I have no experience in anything like that, learning it all from scratch will be too costly and time consuming, I’d rather spend my time on driver and firmware development. I wouldn’t mind joining forces with someone who can take care of the CNC stuff but have not found anyone who both knows what they are doing and wants to do a project like this.
Hi Mike.
Could you explain a bit more how you connect and program the microcontroller to the LEDs? You have a series of LEDs that shows the battery level?
