I’m in the process of designing some new lighting for the house, which I’ll get into in detail later. For now I’m experimenting with Luxeon Rebel LEDs to evaluate the different colors and white temperatures. I started by getting a handful of “warm white” and red, green and blue Rebels. I expected the white ones to be too “cool” in temperature, so the R G and B ones could be individually adjusted to provide some warmth to compensate. I designed a simple PC board that takes three white LEDs and one red, one green and one blue one.
I designed the board in Illustrator and laid out several together on a page, then printed it onto a sheet of toner transfer paper (from Pulsar). I laminated it to a copper-clad board and ran it through again with a “white TRF foil” as an etch-resist layer, as the toner alone tends to be somewhat porous.
I then etched the boards with ferric chloride in a Tupperware dish floating in hot tap water in the bathroom sink, agitating the dish continuously.
After about 25 minutes in the etchant I rinsed the boards, drilled the holes, divided them up and removed the toner from the remaining copper with lacquer thinner and a scotch-brite pad. I soldered the LEDs onto the board, along with a female header to connect wires to. For testing purposes I connected two C batteries together and plugged them into the header.
Luxeon Rebels are designed to dissipate heat through a large “no connection” solder pad directly under the chip. There are specific guidelines for the design of the PCB to draw this heat away from the LED which include a multitude of plated vias to increase the copper surface area. I’m unable to create plated vias in my homemade boards, so my intent is to mount the board to an aluminum plate, using an aluminum machine screw to draw the heat through the hole in the middle of the board.
I learned some important lessons from this first attempt. The main problem is hand-soldering these tiny surface-mount LEDs to such a large copper field, which resulted in a sloppy, lumpy mess of solder. I also realized that I may need to experiment with other combinations of LEDs to get the color right. This first try produced a pleasant white light (and yes, red, green, and blue light does combine into white…I know the theory is fundamental but seeing it happen before your eyes is pretty exciting!) but compared to incandescents and even some of the warm CFLs in my house it still looks very cold.
A good first effort, with room for improvement…