Hey guys. Been a bit inactive on here lately after becoming a bit desensitized to all the new models appearing. So I saw this crazy flood light I want to build something similar also consisting of multiple flood COB LEDs. Looking for ideas from you guys for a combination of
-emitter this?
-driver
-battery
Cooling will be a CPU air or water cooling setup maybe…
Battery thinking maybe an RC battery because they have high discharge, good capacity, but they run at a different range of voltages. Fabrication wise I won’t be using a lathe or a tubular setup. It will be similar to that in the video, ie a hand-carry rudimentary setup purely to make it work.
I would define your goals then build for those goals.
While the light int he video does work it is far from ideal IMHO. A nice toy for sure though.
Are you wanting max lumens and not worried about anything else?
For example from my computer modding days, while water cooling is fun and a good thing, it is not as amazing as it is made out to be on the surface.
You still have to transfer the heat into the air at some point and generally the heat exchange to do that is not much larger then an air cooled heat sink, thus it doesn’t actually have that much better heat transfer. It simply gives you more room inside the computer.
Since we have to carry the whole thing no matter what you would actually get a superior package using air cooled heat sinks I bet since you would not need the water bottle and all the other water cooling parts.
Plus a good computer heat sink would easily handle basically whatever LED you put on it. They are designed to handle upwards of 130w CPU and keep the temps down around 60-70C at room temp. So they would easily handle a 100W + LED and keep it to the rated ~105C without an issue at all. In fact even a stock inter heat sink from the older Dual cores would handle them no problem as they were designed to cool a 100w+ CPU.
So First major change would be to air cooling IMHO.
The next would be to figure out if you want a mule light or a light with an actual beam.
XHP70’s would be a very good option for a light like this and allow you to shrink the footprint quite a bit over the 100W LED’s.
A driver is pretty simple, same for batteries. RC batteries would work fine. If you have a bunch of 18650’s you could use those as well.
Honestly you could consider buying a pre-made off-road light for trucks and wiring it up to a RC battery pack. Should basically get what you want for a lot lest time and effort.
This is definitely just a toy rather than a work light. Just want a fun build for wow factor and then it will probably sit on a shelf. I accept that the build will be a bit crude!
-yes to the mule, max lumen, flood. No beam profile concerns. Just going to stick on an aspheric lens for wide beam
-i will ditch the water cooling as there are indeed some impressive air coolers available for very cheap
-the XHP70s are in similar price range but limited to under 2000 lumen, whereas the Cree COB types seem to be around 6000 but yes, at a much bigger size. Not a real concern if I’m going to wack a few on PC coolers though.
I’ve seen some DC-DC converters that can shift a car battery to within the voltage required, but the AMPS aren’t specified. For eg the Cree runs at a max of 1.5a but how do I know what current it will run at when the converter is within the voltage range?
For the same space you could easily get a lot more lumens out of the xhp70’s. In fact you could fit ~3 of them or more on a single heatsink vs one of the 100w COB’s. Now cooling would be an issue but honestly I doubt you will use them long enough to reach that point. Either option will work though.
Far as the driver goes, there are lots of constant current power modules on ebay that should do the task. If using an RC battery you will most likely have to run a few in series in order to make this work without massive losses and stress on the driver.
