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[Saros]

$55.54 - 20 meters 72w/5M RGB LED strip
$35 - 2x 96w 12v power supply
$27 - 3 sets of Circuit boards - Through OSHPark.com. They have a minimum order quantity of 3 boards per design.
$7.95 - 3x 2.1x5.5mm DC power jacks
~$5 - 6"x23" wooden board for mounting everything.

That's it for the major costs.. not including little things like screws, solder, etc..

I chose that to size the panels at 6"x24" because I can fit two nicely on-top of each half of my 55gal aquarium that I'm using to start seeds/cuttings. It also uses about 6.5m of LED strip per panel which works out to about 62w with only the Red & Blue channels being powered so I'm not exceeding the power rating of the power supply.

 The panels get fairly warm but not so much that they need fans or a heat sink as long as there is some air flow beneath the LEDs. I screwed some 2" screws into each corner of the panel to act as legs in order to lift the panel off the surface of the aquarium lid that I had it resting on.


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The first attachment is the EaglePCB files for the circuit boards. The boards themselves are nothing fancy, they don't require any extra parts and are really just to make soldering easier because I wouldn't want to have to solder individual wires too all the strips. The Red and Blue channels are connected by the jumpers at the top of the "Left" board.. green isn't connected but could be by bridging the two pads on the jumper for that channel. But if I were to turn that channel on on the panels I made, it would put the power consumption over the rated 72w of the power supplies. If you want to order the circuit boards for this, go to OshPark.com, sign up for an account and upload the .brd files for the left and right side.


..And on to the pictures=)

1) The strips on the reel after arrival:
2) Cut the strips up into equal lengths:
3) Mounted the circuit boards on the wood and started attaching the strips:
4) All the strips soldered onto the boards.. I found it extremely useful to test after attaching each strip. It really sucks to solder on a bunch of strips and then realize that there's a bridged solder connection somewhere and then having to go back and remove strips until you find the one with the faulty connection

2 Likes Seed Collector and Roze like this.

[Saros]

5) The power supply:
6) The barrel 2.5mm x 5.5mm barrel connector. this mates with the one on the power supply from the last pic
7) And here it is powered up:
8) Measured 3100lux at approx 12"
9) Measured 1161lux at about 24"

1 Like Seed Collector likes this.

[TBM]

Nicely done! I love the idea of using LED lights I also like how simplistic your design is and how you included the approx cost of the whole project! Great links too!

[Saros]

How well does it work? Seems to work pretty well as far as I can tell. I haven't had any experience with commercially available grow lights, but I've been using one of these since February and added a 2nd in May. I have them atop a 55gal aquarium that I use to start seeds and cuttings. It's located in my basement and gets almost no natural light.  I purposely put it there so I could see if plants would be happy being raised on nothing but light from these panels. 

Here's a list of what I've had growing in there:
- Various Trichocereus seedlings
- P. Alba from leaf cuttings since March and are now about 8" tall and need to graduate from the tank.
- Anadenanthera Peregrina. These grew really fast and were moved out of the tank within a few months.
- Voacanga Africana. like the A. peregrina, these outgrew the space quickly
- Heimia Salicifolia cuttings
- Peganum harmala
- Recently added P. Viridis & Mitragyna Specioca

[happyconcacti]

Hi Saros,

Im curious, do you have the Red and Blue on full power?

With this design is it possible to program the intensity of the Red vs. Blue?

For example, could the blue be bumped up for vegetative growth then switched over to more reds for flowering?


This is awesome by the way! I'm pretty excited about this!

[Saros]

Yep, they're running at full power so so it's a 1:1 ratio. Maybe not the most efficient but it keeps things simple and cheap.

If you wanted to alter the ratio I can think of a few options (listed from simplest to most complex)
1) Add a RGB strip dimmer  between the power input and the strips
2) Buy individual Red and Blue strips and modify the board layout to use a 2-pad connection for the single color strips instead of the current 4-pad connections for RGB strips. Then you can mix & match how many of what color strip you want to use... you could even mix in other things like white, UV, orange... As long as all the different strips are rated for 12v anyway.
3) Add a microcontroller and mosfet transistors to control the brightness of each channel via PWM... I started out down this path originally but I stripped it down to be as cheap and simple as possible.

[New Wisdom]

That's awesome saros! I'll have to try that sometime!

[Sunshine]

310 from 1 foot. Not bad at all if I do say so myself.

Nice DIY TEK bro. Thanks for sharing. +1 from me

[Specialty]

Love this tek! I swear by LED grow lights!!! I got 3 135w LED ufo grow lights 9 spectrum. They are amazing a little slow on flowering side but gets the job done just as well! I know these panels that you made are mainly ment for cacti/veg but still great job on the DIY I have a friend on a different website and we have been discussing DIY 135w ufo lights. In a parts break down it was almost half the cost of buying and shipping the fully made unit itself. Just dont quite get how all the wiring work and soldering should be but he ordered a buttload of parts and is creating 5 units at 80w a peice I believe cost him under like 170 $ I believe to order all the parts n peices.

[Saros]

The biggest problem I've had so far after running these and variations of them for about a year now has been that eventually the power supply dies.. So it's probably a good idea to over-shoot a bit more with the output ratings of the power supply.

But overall I've been very happy with how my plants have survived under them. My main goal is to simply get my plants through the long, dark winter because most of them have to come indoors and our house gets very little natural light inside.  I leave them out in the fall as long as possible before bringing them in, then put them out again as early as I can safely do so in the spring. (It's still about a 5month stretch where they live entirely under LED). Many of them stretch for the light, but I have a lot of plants and not enough lights:-p

Salvia seemed to do great under these.
Caapi was not happy, but they survived. (I'm not 100% sure it was the light or a humidity/soil thing)
Mimosa dropped a lot of their lower leaves and started growing most of it's foliage near the top. They bounced back really fast after going back outside though.
Most of my cacti were under a ~200w led panel that I purchased, though seedlings under these DIY lights seemed happy enough
Psychotrias had no issue with the low light, but their leaves started getting a little crinkly due to low humidity
I had two young Acacia acuminatas didn't survive the winter. I suspect there just wasn't enough light.
Phalaris all did pretty well.. particularly Big Med and Yugo Red, AQ1 did fine but didn't show as much growth as the others. Even outside, it's still that way though

I started building these in longer strips mounted on a long aluminum bar rather than wooden boards. It's more expensive but it looks more professional and works better for my space where I have a bunch of plants lined up along a wall.

I looked into building some with 3w or 5w LEDs for a while but I never came up with a cheap/easy way to power the different LEDs.. each band had different power requirements and I didn't want to put that much manual work and time into building the circuitry to power the LEDs for each band.  Maybe I'll revisit that again this winter when I have more time on my hands:)

[Specialty]

Illl take alook on the other fourm too see what he used for his power source. He threw up a complete shopping list with links so ill grab the link for you. Hes using 3w lights. And my 135w ufos are 3watt and my plants can basically touch them for about 3-5 hours without any damage. I strickly only use led for Mj.

Edit: here is what he was using for a power supply

http://m.aliexpress.com/item/1901553415.html?tracelog=wwwdetail2mobilesitedetail

You should also search the site its an electrical haven!

[Saros]

I just updated the broken links in my original post..

Also I just noticed that have these double-row strips now.
http://www.aliexpress.com/item/NEW-DC12V-5M-Lot-IP66-Silicone-Tube-Waterproof-5050-SMD-120LED-M-600LEDs-Double-Row-RGB/1724247793.html

That's half the soldering folks:)

I don't think they'd fit right on the PCB design that I posted originally, but it shouldn't be hard to modify. When I get around to doing that, I'll upload those designs too.

[Saros]

Thanks for posting that link Specialty, I'll definitely check those out:) I'm interested in building some lights with 3w LEDs before winter arrives.

Now if I could just find a cheaper source for PCBs so i could get a large panel printed for a reasonable price. OshPark is cheap ($1.6 per sq in) but it get's expensive quickly as the boards get bigger and bigger. It seems like that's the part that's going to make it too expensive to be worth while for me. Even if I did an array of say six 4x4" modules of 18leds each (54w) assembled into a larger panel, it would be about $25 per module or $150 total for just the PCBs.

[Specialty]

Pcbs u say? How about 10 for under 20 $

http://m.aliexpress.com/item/1054102678.html?tracelog=wwwdetail2mobilesitedetail

Again the site is an electrical haven! Lol

[Saros]

Well hot damn! I think that just made it affordable:) Now I'm definitely going to give this a shot.