180g DIY LED Lighting
- Thread starter Psylant
- Start date
Well.... for Christmas I got nothing thanks to the postal system. It's been 13 business days now on something that's supposed to be a maximum of 8. I'm starting to 'think they lost the package. That would mean I get to wait another 2-3 weeks! HOORAY! This was supposed to be finished around the start of December. I'm really starting to hate shipping. A lot...
I received all of the parts I needed to finish my build yesterday. I have it all put together and working... almost. Three out of the four strings of lights are working, but one is not. I can't figure out for the life of me why it isn't. I have tried switching the drivers to see if I had a bad connection or driver but it still resulted in the same thing. I've checked to make sure all of the LED clips are snug, that no wires got crossed, and tested all of the LEDs to make sure that one didn't burn out. There's also continuity between all of the connections as far as I could tell (checked with a multimeter). I'm absolutely baffled.
Well... It's done. While my lights and box isn't the prettiest thing around, the light it provides is nothing short of spectacular. It really does look like daylight. The shimmer effect is incredible. I might fit the lens to the LEDs tomorrow; I'm still undecided if I should do it or not. Right now they're throwing off 120 degrees of light and I could read a book 20 feet away from my tank right now, even with the box around them. The lenses would limit that to about 60 degrees. I'm going to try to take a time-lapse of the "sunrise" setting if I can figure out how to do it on my camera for you guys.
Here are a couple pictures:
Here are a couple pictures:
Beautiful! Definitely want to build one of these. Love how the colors seem pop in the pics!
What did you do to fix it?
What did you do to fix it?
I wish I knew. I researched my problem for hours upon hours that night. Frustrated after finding nothing, I went back to my set up to tinker around with it. I did all of the same things I had done before, pushed the connective LED clips together harder, verified all the wires were in correct placement, etc. and then I plugged it in again and it worked... I was just happy that it worked and didn't investigate further. I disassembled it (It was on my dining room table), carried it in parts down to my my tank in the basement and assembled again, and it still works perfectly... So I really can't answer what was wrong!
I can relate. I work on aircraft avionics and there are countless times were disconnecting and reconnecting wires fixes issues. Hell there are many times were all I do is turn a system off and on and its working again.
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