RGB Flood Lights

I built 4 RGB units with 2 each (red, green, blue) MR16 LED bulbs. They work ok but wasn't really pleased with them especially when it came to color blending.  Decided to replace them with something better. Just finished building 2 of the replacements and tested these on a DCx16.  Very pleased with the results.

Chris - Dimming works good - it's slightly better than the dimming I was getting on the MR16's. There's still that low end cutoff point typical of leds  but I'm getting very smooth ramps. and they are alot brighter than MR16s and color mixes are far better. I even had to settle for the 3mm greens since the chinese ebay vendor didn't have the 5mm.  54 LEDs per board,  18 each color, 2 boards per light in the 500W housing.

Edited by bdkeen - 09 Oct 2009 at 1:57pm

Having been on the early end of DIY RGB solutions, let me share a tip:

The RGB tool in Aurora is a "reasonable approximation" of the expected color output.  Given that Aurora can't know the specs of the specific LEDs you are using, combined with the fact the sRGB color gamut (used by PCs) is different than the color gamut achieved by LEDs, there is no way to make the color perfect.

You might have noticed that it is absolutely impossible to create some hues of purple on a PC screen that are possible to create rather intensely with your LEDs.

For a PC screen (or a television), red leans somewhat red-orange, green leans to lime green, and blue has a leaning toward green (but not so much as to make it cyan).  This is leftover from the CRT days when an electron beam struck phosphors that glowed at those wavelengths... those phosphor colors were a compromise in that they were cheaper to produce than RGB accurate phosphors.  As a result, the sRGB space lent itself to reasonable color reproduction in the orange-yellow area (flesh tones) at the expense of very poor purple rendering. 

LEDs on the other hand have different wavelength centers.  While a true red LED is possible, the "super bright" variety tend to be even more red-orange-ish than the sRGB spec red.  Super bright green is truly a pure green (not lime) and LED blue leans slightly toward indigo instead of green (but is far more accurate of a blue than the sRGB spec).  The result is excellent accuracy in the blue-indigo-violet area of the gamut, but rather poor rendering in the orange-yellow area of the gamut (the exact opposite of the sRGB color space).


Edited by LightsOnLogan - 20 Oct 2009 at 11:07am

I used 5mm red and blue but 3mm green. just got the cheap bulk ones from china on ebay(