LED diodes in series, parallel or designated driver for each?

[DavidEF]

@Bruno28

@DavidEF

Running at 12V will be better if you have a good 12V source to use. Drivers that have been designed right here at BLF can easily give you that 2.5A per LED. But, you’d have to order the PCB and components and build the drivers yourself. You could order from Richard at Mountain Electronics, but you’re in Australia, and I don’t know how shipping will be for you. What you need is a Linear driver with either Zener Diode or LDO to use the higher voltage. You could use a FET driver, but that won’t give you any current regulation, so the LEDs will get all the current that your source can give, which might be too much. Also, as you suspected, if one LED does die for any reason, the current will be deferred to the other LEDs.

Edit: 3A per LED will work too. :partying_face:

So i need to build a driver myself? Can it have a low medium and high output modes, where high output needs to be 18 amps?

Oh yeah, you can have practically any modes you want! Just like we have people here designing driver boards, we have people writing firmware practically all the time. Use the Search box at the top left of the screen to look up two of the best driver firmwares currently available - Bistro (by ToyKeeper) and Narsil ( by TomE). If neither of those is exactly what you want, go to ToyKeeper’s firmware repository and look at some of the other choices that are out there. Also, if you do end up looking at Mountain Electronics, you have several of these excellent drivers and firmwares to choose from there, already built and coded to order!