Oh yeah bring it, vertical led! I knew I wasn’t the only one crazy enough to do this!
Awwww… hell now I’ve gotta math out my cabs canopy “if it were laid out”. I should know this… I built it. Gotta find my notes, I dont wanna reach back in there with a tape measure right now. I just finished getting my arms de-glued after defoliation an hour ago.
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.
@ReikoX, spend that $100 on a Raspberry Pi and some solid state relays, and install Mycodo. If you are considering an Arduino then you’ve already got the chops for it, but it’s so much more powerful and so much easier. You’ll get lighting control, from your phone, and so very, very much more in the long run. Bet that Bluefish controller isn’t going to calculate realtime VPD and dim your lights or change your fans to adjust for that. Seriously, just get Mycodo, you’ll be glad you did.
Hoping to get a post up detailing my new Mycodo controller build in the next week here, assuming life doesn’t continue to get in the way of what really matters, like gardening.
I’ve seen you’re UFO with Mycodo. It’s some slick tech Rick. In my younger days, I would have been all over that. But nowadays, that just feels like work. I’m a software engineer and make medical devices for a living.
I already own a Bluefish controller, it has some fancy features like simulating weather and lighting hours of a geographic location, sunrise/sunset, and a preset picture mode. It was developed for the aquarium industry. Those reef guys go crazy for their gadgets too.
Only reason I mentioned the Arduino because I already own one.
Hey you can’t argue with tech you’ve already got on hand, it was the spare Raspberry Pi sitting in my parts collection that got me into this mess in the first place.
I’ve wandered into the reef forums on occasion while researching various ideas for hydro builds. Those people are absolutely every bit as into their fish and all the tech that goes with it as we are into our plants. It’s funny how much we all have in common, if fish were illegal they’d be exactly like us!
The 560mm 3500k EB2 strips are back in stock today at digikey for those interested.
https://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/bridgelux/BXEB-L0560Z-35E2000-C-B3/976-1734-ND/7907663
Ordered up the parts in the LDD build above. Not really for any other reason than to tinker.
Ok have it mapped out, I’m an off the shelf guy, Rigid 24” part with hexagonal mounting points and light weight material that will heat sink (tubular) for passive or active airflow. Does this work for a body, want it as slim as possible.
For this I have either 6-1” mounting surfaces or 1/2” with smaller nuts.
How are you envisioning this assembly?
Cheers
G
6 - 24” x 1/2” max strip size, thicker the better. What’s normal mounting procedure?
Holy shit that’s a faucet supply line! Wow you really do want em skinny. I assume you plan on running several of these vertically? It seems like one of them wouldn’t give you a lot of wattage. As far as mounting is concerned I plan to screw mine down. The issue I see with that supply line nut is that you are going to have to drill and tap threaded holes into each side of that if you want to be able to sink a short machine screw into it. If you dont have a drill press, or at least a vice or a clamp and some patience you’re gonna hate that part. Plus, those nuts are gonna be nickel or chrome plated brass or steel. You’ve got a bunch of holes ahead of you, save yourself some hassle and get a cobalt drill bit, High speed steel cheapies will dull out quick. Use lube, go slow.
You know where I’m going @Ginger_Rick. Neighbor has a Harley shop in the barn…He’s got an awesome set of tools. 
. I’m a carpenter by trade , other hobby is vintage car restoration . Yes looking for a thin profile I’m lost on electric and light part. Just want to know what strip would be best for veg and flower with either 6 or 12 strips? Length needs to be 24” width can be up to half inch Light will be around 12” from canopy all the way around.
Hah, sorry to lowball you with the hole drilling 101 there @Instg8ter! I didn’t know if you had a history with tools, still figuring out who people are around here.
I’m still no pro on what the hottest new strips are, it seems like lots of people are getting great results out of the Bridgelux line. The ones I just picked up from Future Electronics are just clones as I understand, and were available when the bridgelux were out of stock.
I’m planning to use the ones I’ve just gotten for a couple of 150w 2x2 flat canopy cabinets for friends. While I’ve had them sitting here waiting on those builds I’ve been playing with ideas for my eventual lighting upgrade in my UFO cab.
So I finally reached back in there with my tape measure, it came back all sticky. My current usuable vertical canopy is 16.3 square feet. That’s the back wall and the two sides, but when I upgrade my light I should be able to light the front wall as well and that will get me to to 23 square feet. Right now I’m running 450 watts of SIL bulbs, spread over 16.3 feet, for 27.6w per square foot. The plants are loving it.
I’ve often seen it suggested that you need about 40w per ft square when flowering under LEDs, but I’ve also seen people moving those lights up a lot higher above their canopy than I have space for in my vertical setup. I’ve also seen clever cats like @Mr.Sparkle talking about flowering in the 30ish range and doing fine in close quarters like he runs. Inverse square law and so forth.
The strips I got will run about 150w on 9 of them. If I wrapped all 18 that I have around a vertical hexagon I’d have 300w of leds, but spread over 23 sq ft I’d only get 13 watts per foot! That’s not chunky flower numbers.
But even if I double that, 36 strips, 600 watts, it’s still just hitting 26w sq ft! And at that point I’m running 36 strips 20mm wide, so I end up with a hexagon that is 9-1/2" wide with 4.75" faces. Bigass hexagon.
So I’m still doing the math, and it honestly seems crazy to me. From a lot of what I’ve read 26w per sq ft should be too low for flowering, but I’m running just over that right now and things look good. Of course my gals are real close to their photon sources, and so again the inverse square law comes out. But no matter how I look at the numbers it always seems like 600 watts in a wardrobe cabinet seems impossibly high, and yet 26 watts a square foot seems unfortunately low.
I’m running 54w/sqft and fuck me that is a bright bitch in a 4x4
The Gen 3 Bridgelux slim lines are 1/2" wide, that might help with the size of the hexagon when going to 600 watts.
Cheers
G
this should be on the outside of your tent
How much space have you got between your lights and your canopy?
Ah ha! The strips I’ve got now are 20mm, so 0.78 inch. That extra 0.28 inch will end up making a big difference, thanks! Now to look up gen 3 bridgelux, clutch my wallet, and weep…
Rick, I’m sure you are aware of the inverse squares law on these lights. Since you are running mere inches from the lights, 13-watts/square foot will likely be plenty, you just wont have good penetration.
Not that part of me wouldnt love to see you cram 600-watts of strips in there. 
Remember that calculations of the inverse square law must be modified slightly when you have multiple light sources. It’s not as straightforward as a quarter of the “power” for each doubling of distance from a single point source, especially when you have thousands of point sources, such as builds using strips or QBs.
You waste much of the energy of photons due to absorption when they hit any surface other than a leaf. Quite a bit, in fact, which is why you run strips low to the canopy and try to minimize wall losses, which can be 10-20% or more. If we’re OK with losing that much to walls, or if we’re OK with losing efficiency in using budget drivers that operate at 3, 5, 10, or 20% less efficiency than the best in class drivers, why do we care about using efficient LEDs? Why not just go back to bulbs, if you’re prepared to accept those losses?
I would still recommend around 25w/sqft of current high efficiency white midpower LEDs run at or near nominal current (July 2020), since most strips in this category are going to give you a lot of photons per joule in a good spectrum. As you mentioned, @Ginger_Rick, Bridgelux is the current king of the hill in a cost/benefit calc. They’re testing really, really well for the price.
Also keep in mind that the nebulous conventional wisdom of “penetration” is also modified not just by the necessary changes to the inverse square calculations when using multi-point light sources, but also by specific parts of the photosynthetically active spectrum. It’s now known that green, yellow and far red spectrum photons can travel through multiple leaves. This is a double-edged sword due to certain plant species’ response to various ratios of these wavelengths to each other, e.g. far red shade avoidance, but is generally a good bit of info for the conscientious DIY strip builder.
