Lighting up your sub... (LED how to)

[KevinMC]

Nuke, Your Akula looks great,

Nuke, Your Akula looks great, I'm glad to have helped. (I guess this means I need to get off my can and light up my OSCAR to match!)

Chris/Ed,
Ed is spot-on that it's only the Vf term that matters. Ed is also on the right path with the idea of leaving some margin in the current value, although you could also argue that the LED probably has some margin for error in it's If spec anyways.

Chris, yes you most certainly can run LEDs with different Vf's in the same circuit as long as you wire them up in series and as long as your Vbatt is greater than the sum of all the Vf's you wish to use.

R= [Vbatt - (Vf1+Vf2+Vf3)] / If

Feel free to PM/Email me if you have any more questions.

[Rogue Sub]

cstranc
What type of boat are

cstranc
What type of boat are you doing. A friend and I are also working on making An "s" light for our boats. It usualy on the mast in amber and it blinks "s" in morse code to identify the boat as a submarine at night.

Also another awsomw place to get just about anything electronic is www.allelectronics.com they are really cheap. By the way Radio shack is a massive rip off dont go there for LEDs youl pay 4x as much or more.

Another note I see ramius has mentioned using a rod to get your lights where you want them. If you dont want to bother with that you can always sand down the led to the shape you desire. The only thing is that you have to be careful not to sand down to the little gold wire that jumps from the two electrodes. Doing so will ruin the led. This is how i did my boat. I shaped them all to the desired shape. Also if you leave the edges roughed up from sanding you can lose the 30 degree viewing angle that most LEDs have and it will radiate in all directions. But if you want that focused light you can use a high grit wet csand and bring the surfaces back to a shine. Also noteable is that the farther you bring the diode itself out of the hull the brighter it will be.

Heres a diagram of how i did mine. The whites are rated for 20mah but im running them at 3v @ 5mah to keep the brightness down abit because of their high luminosity (try to keep a little scale). The red and green leds are running at 2v @ 20mah. I put more current to these due to the fact that their luminosity ratings were at 26 and 20 where as the white ones were at about 10000.


Just some more ideas.

[cstranc]

Nuke,
My build thread is

Nuke,
My build thread is at: http://s181686668.onlinehome.us/phpBB2/ ... oards.php5 (Project 945 Sierra 1).

Kevin, Nuke, Ed,
I really have to thank you for the info. If I can't get this to work now it's can only be because I get confused which end of the soldering iron to use.

Being the type of person that loves to know things. I do have a couple of little questions left if anyone is interested...

Vf and Vr. I always thought these were Voltage Forward and Voltage Reverse. So if I had a Red/Green LED that had Vf = 2.4V and Vr=5.0 I would see a voltage of 2.4V for one color and 5.0V for the other. Listening to you folks this does not sound correct. You only look at Vf.

Water proofing? I remember on another thread someone describing soldering (carefully) then applying silicone and heat shrink tube on top. But last year in Carmel I was amazed to see some people with connections open to the water. If I am going to be a fresh water sailer only (no chlorinated pools either) what is the appropriate level of water protection?

Replacing LEDs. I inherited a pile of red / green LEDs. But I don't have the specs on them. Out of curiosity I applied 3 volts and I had 12 of them nicely lit up. Then later I turned them on again and 11 lit up, 10, ... They did not actually burn out (done that too) but it gave me this uneasy feeling about making them tooo permanent.

Chris

[KevinMC]

Hi Chris,

Careful about getting the

Hi Chris,

Careful about getting the solderin iron the wrong way around, that can hurt!

Vr refers to the max voltage that can be applied to a diode in reverse and not do it any damage. As applied in electronics, diodes are frequently used as electron check-valves, allowing current to freely flow in one direction but not the other. When they halt the flow of current, a diode will see the full battery voltage across it- so long as that voltage is less than the diode's Vr the LED/diode simply blocks the flow of current. If the battery voltage is greater than the LED/diode's Vr, it breaks down and bad things happen.

As applied to LEDs in our subs, we generally only ever want to use them in a forward biased condition so the figure of consequence is Vf.

Waterproofing? I've heard of all manners. But if you're only running fresh water, and certainly if you setup your lighting system with an eye for maintenance, I'd only go so far as heatshrinking over your solder connections (as much for strain relief as anything else).

With respect to your inherited LEDs, you said that the didn't actually burn out, but they wouldn't turn on either? I'm confused. Were they all in series, or were you testing them individually? Is it possible that you just had them hooked up backwards?

[ramius-ii]

Hey Chris

Maybe if you think of the LED in this manner, it will make more sense. The LED contains two LED's in one package. If you apply you + voltage, say to the longer lead, and - to the shorter lead, you will have one color as this is the direction the LED is wired internally. Reverse the voltage (+ to the shorter lead and - to the longer lead, you will have the "other" internal LED as this is the correct polarity for it. I am not sure what your ultimate goal is for using a dual color LED. In most applications, such as missile status, you would have green for missile ready to fire and red for no missile present or not ready to fire. Keep in mind that dual color LED's come in two flavors. The dual color two lead version and the dual color three lead version. The three leaded version might be better for your application. Just a thought.

Alternatively, you could, if there is not a big difference in the voltages, connect both supplies to the LED and switch the ground between the two pins for the correct color. This is typically NOT done and it wastes power. The supply not in use now has a resistor to ground drawing a small amount of current.

Hope all of this is a worthwhile contribution to your project.

Best, Ed

[Guest]

These guys are good for

These guys are good for small quantities of LED's-

http://lsdiodes.com/

Postage is reasonable and so are the prices. You can find cheaper on ebay, but you'll have to buy a shedload to get the discount.

Andy

[crazy ivan]

Chris said:Out of curiosity I

Chris said:

Out of curiosity I applied 3 volts and I had 12 of them nicely lit up. Then later I turned them on again and 11 lit up, 10, ... They did not actually burn out (done that too) but it gave me this uneasy feeling about making them tooo permanent.

It sounds like Chris may have applied the voltage directly to each LED without a limiting resistor (or too small a value resistor). If that's the case, they were probably overstressed, and I wouldn't trust them.

[cstranc]

George,
That is exactly

George,
That is exactly what I did. What was it that Kevin said "don't go there"...

Chris

[Rogue Sub]

Dont feell bad I did

Dont feell bad I did it to a couple at first as well. Live and learn. Read my signature. Besides your Sierra totaly redeems you.

[robse]

A little help: Flashing top light etc

Hi.

As real subs has an amber flashing light on the top of the sail, I made this small curcuit that will 'morse' an "S". (That's what the real boats has)
The circuit also includes 2 white (fore and aft), a green and a red LED.

Link to circuit etc: http://www.robse.dk/pages/SSBN/ElecLigt.htm

Shortly I'll be fitting the rest of the lights, and post images of that.

[Rogue Sub]

Robse
Out of curiousity where did

Robse
Out of curiousity where did you place your amber "S" light and forward white light the pictures on your sight are not all working

[robse]

Hi Nuke :-)

Well, it's actially THÉ point at where work is at right now, but images will follow quite soon.

Amber: It's going on a small mast comming out of the top of the sail.. thinking about a permanent mast extending app. ½ -> 1 inch, so light will always be there if needed.

White: The white forward light will go on front of the sail, the drilled hole can be seen here:



The white LED is so powerfull, that it'll actually work as a guide in dark conditions, and this is why I placed it in this no-so-quite-true-to-scale-position..

[cstranc]

Now when I scanned the

Now when I scanned the naughtical rules for lighting I thought it said "red & green and white all around" meaning white lights on the bow and stern.

Robse,
You are indicating an amber light on top of the sail. Is this specific to a certain type or nationality of sub?

Nuke, Kevin, Ed
I'm not sure if I will get time to do lighting this weekend, but I have now got a variety of variable resistors for the next time I sit down to play... Thanks again for all your help. I will be heading off to lsdiodes to get those white diode soon.

Chris

[Rogue Sub]

About the amber light. Read

About the amber light. Read one of our previous posts again in this thread

[cstranc]

As in "amber light on

As in "amber light on a mast" and white fore and aft.

Thanks