Now that I have the rooms pretty well built, it is time to work on the lighting. The plan for the veg room has has always been to have a wire shelf with LED strips on it. I would use two shelves for my bonsai mothers, a shelf for seedlings/clones, and maybe a shelf with a couple of autos. With the low price of the Bridgelux EB Gen2 strips, the choice there easy. I settled on twoBXEB-L0560Z-50E2000-C-B3 per shelf. I could match those eight strips with a XLG-150-L-AB driver and for about $75 USD (not including tax or shipping) be done with it.
But wait a minute, I’m an engineer! let’s over engineer this a little bit. First off, this driver will allow me to dim the lights, but all the shelves will have the same intensity. Clones only need a little light, while bonsai mothers need a moderate amount of light, and autos can use a lot more light. The simple solution is to buy four XLG-25-AB and run one driver on each shelf with a potentiometer (a bit under driven, but within specs). This setup is around $160 USD (not including tax or shipping).
Now it is time to really over engineer this thing! Let’s add an LED controller! The simplest method would be to do the previous build (with four drivers) and connect them to a Bluefish LED Controller. This controller costs about $200 USD bringing the total cost up to $360. That’s a lot of money for 100 Watts. They sell a Bluefish Mini for only $100 USD, but it wont work with the 10V PWM of the XLG drivers. They will, however, work with the LDD-700H drivers. These take a DC input and give a CC output. I can run four of these off of a single LRS-150-48 AC DC converter. This setup is about $185 USD. Rapid LED sells a board that sells a LDD-H-4S board that happens to hold four LDD drivers as well as a SCW05B-12 to provide 12V power to PC fans! This brings my total up to around $220 USD.
Now, the nice thing about the LDD drivers is they work on a lower voltage PWM than the XLG drivers. I could, in theory, use an Arduino I have laying around to give provide the PWM signal to the LDD drivers. This saves $100 USD and brings the build down to $120. That’s cheaper than the simple build using XLG four drivers and has slightly more wattage. Granted, for that $100 you get the ability to control your lights from your phone, setup presets, simulate weather, and much more. Not to mention the time it would take me to program the Arduino, I could program for my job and make that $100 in far less time.