I’ve written a new article; “Three Watts of Light“. The subject is my first experiences with ‘true’ illumination grade solid state lighting. I’ve played with a lot of leds over the years, but these leds are in a class of their own. The light they generate and the power they require makes it a “whole nother ball-game”.
I finally became bored with the word-press default theme – not that there is anything wrong with it, but hey, change is good right?
This new theme is called “Ocadia” designed by Becca Wei.
I like the shaded boxes in the side-bar and the fact this theme is not overloaded visually or functionally. Some of the themes out there have way too many links, buttons, do-dads and hoopla for simple ‘ol me.
Subject Material:
Molex Type-KK Pins
Light Source:
Custom Made Solid State Trichromatic
UFO … That’s what they’re called, maybe because they are around, maybe because the vendors grew weary of calling them luxeon clones. No, I’m not writing about some errant weather balloon, the planet venus, or my neighbors truck seen through beer goggles… I’m writing about some high-output LEDs
These are the first of any ‘next gen’ leds I’ve worked with … I’m stoked they are so tiny … its often hard to tell the scale when you just see pictures of these things online with nothing of known size in the shot.
the big black module is an RGB ufo, with three one watt emitters in a single package. It’s wired as a common anode device… should work out well with my led controller project. The small led in the top of the picture is a white piranha led. The smaller silver module is a blue UFO.
This is the die of a blue ufo, running at a greatly reduced capacity. I still had to stop my camera all the way down to take this shot with any amount of detail … (1/4000s f7.3)
More pictures to come. I have a red, blue and green mounted to an old 586 heatsink which provides ample cooling to the 3 watt load, I’m going to work on mounting the driver circuitry to the backside of the heatsink and should have some pictures shortly!
Here’s a request from my buddy Linear:
Wondering aloud, would it be possilbe to socket those LEDs so you could reconfigure the array later? (any thoughts, JustDIY?)
The quote came from a longer thread, where the led being discussed is the high-flux “piranha” package. Well, he must have me pegged as some sort of piranha expert 😛
So I pulled out a few leds, and some different sockets. Here is what I came up with:
The black strips are Molex C-Grid board to board connectors … the mating board would have pin headers on it, and the two shall mate. But, they also work decently well for holding other things, sorta like a breadboard does.
Depending on how you wire the pins underneath, the headers accept the LED in either orientation (piranha have two pins for each cathode and anode, which are connected inside the package)
I also tried other cheaper and easier to find sockets, like machined pin and standard spring … they just don’t line up with the piranha’s leads.
Only had a few hours to work on the project today, but I didn’t let that slow me down.
I revised the interface for setting the date, it now works like the channel namer, opposed to how it worked before.
Before:
User could move the cursor left and right, and had to press a third button to select which value to edit, then the user could increase/decrease the value and press the third button to save the new value.
After:
User can only move the cursor from left to right, wrapping at the far-right to the far-left… this is using button 3… Buttons 1 and 2 increase/decrease the value under the cursor, saving it each time.
Added a new ‘screen’ to the display, it cycles through the temperature channels individually now, displaying their names.
Added a new interface for enabling and disabling channels. This effects which channels are displayed by the above mentioned screen.
The code now supports up to ten channels.
I found the source of the intermittent temperature readings by examining the recommended circuit versus what I had built. Maxim recommends a 200 ohm resistor to be placed in series with VCC for the MAX1668 … so, after doing that – no more random drop outs … weird eh?
I also discovered, when writing a rapid fire string of bytes to the eeprom, it likes you to wait ~10ms after each byte … which is mentioned in the eeprom datasheet, but I keep forgetting that.
Well, I’ve been noticing a LOT of 404’s regarding favicon.ico in the logs … so I made up an empty bitmap, and stuck it on the server root.
That took care of the errors. Then I got curious about what favicon.ico was for … turns out it’s the little widget that’s displayed on the url bar and when you save a bookmark.
The canvas size? A whopping 16×16 pixels… I’m no artist, so I just put a red J with a drop shadow for now… I’m sure I can think up something better down the road
Enjoy!
Well, aside from household chores, normal human interactions, eating, and what-not… I spent the weekend working on my MAX1668 temperature probe project.
Check out the updated writeup:
For whatever reason, some pictures decide not to load. I see the errors in my log on the server, as HTTP Code 304. Something seems to be happening in the voodoo my shared host uses to make my domain seem to be on its own box … “virtual servers”. Because I’m lazy I’ve been using relative links to my pictures, rather than absolute links; this doesn’t seem to play well with the hosts voodoo, so, I’ll be using absolute links from now on and hope that resolves things.
If a pic isn’t loading for you, please leave a comment or shoot me an email (gordonthree at gmail dot com).
*edit* thanks to linear for pointing out that 304 isn’t an error, it just means the content hasn’t changed… so I’m not sure what the cause was for those of you who mentioned you couldn’t see a picture – hopefully whatever it was, it stays fixed!
I’ve created a new page under Technology and Projects. Digging through my samples box, I came across the MAX1668 from Dallas-Maxim.
The 1668 is a five channel temperature probe with a serial interface. My final goal for this project is to hook the 1668 up to a large VFD display for monitoring temperatures.
Check it out … there are a ton of pictures, so dialup beware!