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Light Module V3

A project log for MoAgriS: Modular Agriculture System

Growing food crops and other plants in small indoor spaces using established containers like regular plant pots and very little money.

timonskutimonsku 01/04/2019 at 17:021 Comment

The new PCBs and components arrived this week (thanks again to LCSC for that) and I soldered up a module to test everything.
Everything fit and is working as expected which is great! I also tried out new fuse holders that a corrspondent from LCSC found for me, which are much cheaper than the fuse holders from Schurter that I used before. I feared they might not have the same strength as this was the main  reason I used the expensive fuse holders so far but they were actually a bit stronger!
This is so far great news for my plan to produce a small round of light modules as it will drop the price quite a bit.

I did some new temperature tests as I now used a 2oz. copper PCB as planned. This did a lot for transferring the heat away from the LEDs, after a good hour of full on use the LEDs were idling around 60°c which is 20°c below their max. operating temperature.

I hope this helps a lot with LED lifetime which I found to be an issue previously.

I also cut together a lamp shade for testing out the concept of using metal sheeting (copper in this case because I had it around) for a robust and reflective lamp shade. This worked out really well, I used paper fasteners inserted into the mounting holes which were holding the shade in place quite firmly. I wanted to test a fastening method that doesn't require metal bolts and nuts. This way attaching a shade is a lot faster and only requires material that you can find in practically any store that sells even the most basic office supplies and it actually looks kind of nice.

You don't have to use copper and brass of course, using zinc steel or stainless steel sheet metal works just as well. Paper fasteners are also available in zinc color.

Before anyone gets concerned, no the lamp shade does not short everything out :)
Even though the edges in this prototype are super bend up there are still about 3-4mm space between the shade and the rods.



Discussions

Jarrett wrote 01/04/2019 at 23:25 point

Hmmmmmm I want one

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