Hello Everyone!
Quick bit about myself, I am a high school student and I do lighting and sound for my school, among other places. I want to help upgrade our existing halogen lamp lights to LED. My electronics skills when it comes to circuitry is almost non-existent. I am competent with my hands and electronics in general but I digress. My idea is to use an LED-Engin (Osram) 80w RGBW LED and make a drop in package, similar to ETC S4, for our Leko lights. I want to use the sparkfun DMX shield and the thing Plus?
My problems
I think I need Mosfets? Do I need LED drivers too, what components do I need to make this work?
Hi Benula.
The DMX Shield is pretty much just a interface between a DMX light and a micro controller. (In this case a SparkFun Thing Plus) What it does it take TTL serial data and convert it to RS-485 serial and then outputs that over a 3 pin XLR connector like those found on some DMX devices.
In your case, you are wanting to drive a high power LED module and you’re going to need some sort of LED driver to do that. The power levels you’re needing are a lot higher than anything we have a driver for unfortunately so I don’t think we’re going to be able to help much with that. I would imagine someone probably makes some sort of retrofit kit that has LEDs and a driver made to fit your lamps, but you’d need to search online for those as I’m not familiar with any myself.
If you can locate a retrofit kit, OR a driver that will operate the size and type LEDs you’re looking to use, see if you can get a DMX option for them. If you can, the the DMX shield should be able to control them but the DMX shield alone and some MOSFETs unfortunately are not going to be enough.