Comparing brightness & power draw of 3W LED vs Neopixel Ring

Components & Accessories LEDs
1

I’m making a battery powered LED lantern driven from a microcontroller such as the ESP32 https://www.sparkfun.com/products/15663 or ESP32-S2 https://www.adafruit.com/product/4769

I’m trying to determine the brightest LED it can support for a minimum of 2hrs on a LiION battery, perhaps betw 2200 - 4400mAH; such as a single or multicell version of this battery: https://www.sparkfun.com/products/13189 or this one https://www.adafruit.com/product/1781

For the LED’s I’m comparing:

3W RGB LED: https://www.sparkfun.com/products/15200

vs

16pixel Neopixel Ring: https://www.sparkfun.com/products/12664

vs

24pixel Neopixel Ring: https://www.sparkfun.com/products/12665

Primary Question:

How do the Brightness and Power Usage of these LEDs compare?

Usage questions:

I believe the Neopixels should be relatively plug & play like an LED strip, just add a 300 Ohm resistor & aybe capacitor.

But for the 3W, in addition to adding an extra heat sync, is it also necessary to have a boost or buck converter like this to drive it?: https://www.sparkfun.com/products/13716

Any advice here would be greatly appreciated, thanks!

2

Re: Usage, If I switch from the “naked” 3W RGB LED to this equivalent one instead that has a WS2811 chip: https://www.adafruit.com/product/4544

Then maybe I can skip extra converters/resistors/capacitors…

3

The 24 LED version is going to be about 33% brighter than the 16 LED version. It’s also going to draw about 33% more power.

At max power the 16 LED version is going to need about 1000mA to run, the 24 LED version will need about 1440mA.

Two cells in parallel should run the 16 LED version for 2 hours, you will want 3 cells in parallel for the 24 LED version.