Wow, just realized that screenshot gives away some compromising personal data! 
Yep, the close observer will note that it is evidence that I do stay up all night, hitting the bong, killing my battery on data sheets and doing engineering math till the birds chirp.
Because I am a totally sane and reasonable individual, and that’s the sort of thing totally sane and reasonable people do of course. 
Going for the gen 3’s eh? Good on ya! 
My cost/benefit analysis (for my application) convinced me to go for gen 2’s.
Also, I’m doing HLG series instead of XLG.
If you are in the GTA check out A1 Electronics for things like linear pots etc. (have a close look at their other stuff too).
Here is a little puzzle for you.
How would you apply the the typical flux (~2500lux for those strips you are looking at) to your application?
The numbers for a typical light configuration like @fishdude above seem to correlate relative to the 30W/ft2 guide for larger lights but do not for smaller lights.
Cheers
G
Hi @fishdude, good looking light you are building there!
Have you done any thermal testing yet? I’d be interested to see what your temperature rise is on the top of the strips at full power.
Cheers
G
Unfortunately, I have no infrared thermometer. I can try checking temps above and below the fixture and comparing it to ambient temperatures.
I can say that “6 from the light provides 800 micromols, while “12 provides 680.
To my neophyte eyes, that seems like excellent penetration.
Thanks bud, it’s always nice to get the reality check from good peeps instead of accidentally releasing the acrid blue smoke of circuit sadness! 
As my ol electronics prof said it just factory pre injected warning smoke, and when you know something went wrong, its just that “the smoke was let out” lol
Hah! The warning smoke! I had a shop teacher in high school who put it just like that! Classic.
In all fairness though, it is VERY informative smoke.
My CS teacher said it was the magic smoke that made electronics work. When the smoke leaves, the electronics no longer work. He also used the phrase “giving up the ghost” because the smoke kinda looks like a ghost.
Yep, thanks to you actually for tipping me off to their svelte trim figure! The reduction in diameter of the lighting unit and the increase in efficiency will more than make up for the pain in my wallet. It’ll pay itself back within 2 harvests even if I totally crap the bed anyhow, so in the long run it’s worth it for the tight quarters I’m working with.
Heh heh… as for this little puzzle, well I was up late with the math again last night. I’ve got so.e pretty heavy nerdiness for ya I’ll post up a little later tonight.
Heh… “Little” puzzle he says. Real cute buddy! 
Well I’ve certainly done a bit more puzzling, and already I have found an issue in my numbers from the other night. So the other day I was trying to figure out what would actually be hitting my canopy surface since my light will be a cylinder and all the strips will be pointing in slightly different angles. With 24 of them in a circle thats 15 degrees each. When I looked at it the other night I came up with this…
OOPS! Wrong Rick, too simplified, because power drops off on a curve as you move out towards the limits of the viewable angle. Behold, the Spatial Radiation Pattern!
We can see that Viewable Angle is defined in tiny print at the bottom as “the off axis angle from the centerline where lv is 1/2 of the peak value”
So I’m going to have to average out the power for the 8 strips that will be “viewable” from any single point on the canopy. Out of 24 strips wrapped around 360 degrees, each comprising 15 degrees of the circle, 8 strips will rest within the 120 degree sweep of the viewable angle. But since power drops off as we move to the edges of the viewable angle they wont all be depositing their photons evenly on our chosen canopy point.
The strips I’ve chosen are Bridgelux EB Series Slim Gen 3, in the 590mm length. Driven at nominal values they deliver 186lm/W, 2492 Lumens per strip.
Out of 8 strips per “viewable” section:
- 2 will deliver 100% power, 2492lm each
- 2 will deliver 80% 1994lm each
- 2 will deliver 60% 1495lm each
- 2 will deliver 50% 1246lm each
Add it all up and that’s 14,454 lumens, per 8 strip section, hitting a single point on the canopy, at nominal voltage and current levels. So what does that give us for lux hitting the canopy surface?
51,121lux!
Again, this is for about 11" from the light, and my plants are mostly closer than that, so I think I should be just fine with this much power. But what if i’m not? Well, I could potentially overdrive them a little…
The datasheet lists the tested, nominal current as 700mA, but the max rated is 1.7A! That leaves plenty of room to push things a little harder, right? So lets just push it a bit, say up to 1A, what’s that going to give us?
Overdriven to just 1A we’re getting about 140% of the luminous flux we would running at nominal levels. We’re still 700mA below the maximum rating and not pushing on things too hard. At that point the numbers come out like this…
64,400 lux, easily enough to get us into chunky nugget territory!
So next up is picking a driver, which I’m still looking at, seeing how much it would cost to give me more or less room to push them harder. Hoping I can narrow that down tomorrow so i can finally pull the trigger on these babies! 
I love the way you just go all “Cannonball” into the deep end of the pool!!
If you are going to go 40% overdrive you will need to look at thermal management closely. I’d suggest some .75" x .75" x 1/16" aluminum angle. Try Metal Supermarket & they will cut to length too. Mounting will require some precision.
Thermal interface material - “cheap” grease (yeah, good luck with the cheap part).
Air flow and thermal sensors!
Drivers are interesting, like most other folks, I like Mean Well, specifically the HLG series. They top out at 600W so bigger lights might need 2. B & A/B units have remote dimming capabilities.
The nice thing is you can mount them externally to the UFO and run the power in on 14AWG (copper losses get added to the nominal strip voltage!)
Aren’t builds fun! 
Cheers
G
Hah! Well yes, thank you, I am somewhat prone to a certain nerdy exuberance when I get going on a project. 
So, ahem… feast your eyes upon this wallet pain inducing Digikey cart, cuz it’s about to get real in here. Really bright!
Ouch! Good thing my wife loves the purdy flowers I grow her. So let’s break that cart down a bit…
-HLG-75-HA
This one is to run 3 strips I’ve got left over in the little veg and breeding cabinet that’s currently over at my buddies. It’ll be coming home after my ACMPR papers arrive.
-24 x BXEB-L0590U-35E1500-C-C3
Bridgelux EB SLIM GEN 3 590MM
These will form the main lighting unit, wired up with groups of 2 in series, all 12 groups in parallel, run around 40ish volts for nominal values. They will be powered by a…
But there’s more! Started thinking through the rework and decided I’ll be moving my res outside the cab when I do the change up to the new lights. With it gone my plant sites will drop to about 2" off the floor, adding an additional 14" in canopy height! Combined with the 360 degree lighting and the ability to grow on the side the doors are on I will end up adding an additional 17.7 square feet of useable canopy space, more than doubling my current 16.3 ft2! Of course, that’s gonna need more lighting to cover it, and so…
-24 x BXEB-L0340U-35E0750-C-C3
Bridgelux EB SLIM GEN 3 340MM
These will fill out the canopy space opened up by the res change, and I’m powering them with an identical eye towards overdriving as the 590mm strips. They are the same series, just shorter, so totally comparable performance wise. They run at 10.9v nominal so I’ll just do all of them in parallel I figure. I’ll be firing them up with a…
-Meanwell HLG-320H-12B
LED DRVR CC/CV AC/DC 6-12V 22A
It’s more wattage than I need by far, but there wasn’t really much available around 260ish watts, so price wise this does it. I’m going to have to keep it turned way down not to overdo my strips though.
So yeah, its gonna get a bit crazy when I redo the UFO after this current round! Wily sativas I’m looking in your direction here! I’m expecting to run things at the tested specs, or likely even below, but even at that point I’m looking at 505 watts! If I did crank it up as high as I would ever consider I’d be looking at about 720 watts!!
Well, come the dark days of winter you just might see that happen!!
I’m looking to pull the trigger on this order in the next couple of days, so @Gpaw, @Mr.Sparkle, if you guys have any thoughts on my driver and wiring plans I’d love hear them!
Thanks everyone, I know this was another loooooong post!
@Ginger_Rick I have the same sentiment as @ReikoX not that I haven’t dived down the build/project rabbit holes many of times and like to see what people do but a re-shift may be in order for a less light wallet and a easier way to an end goal, I’ll give you a shout by pm tomorrow 
to be that partially sane or bad enabler to some ideas lol.
Thanks, I appreciate it. I do wonder if I’d be paying for a bunch of power I’m never even going to use with those drivers
My gf is wanting me to build her a light for her tropical collection (after her hindu rope flourished in my tent lol).
With her set up, I’m wanting to use the 4 foot strips. Am I correct in thinking I can get away with 5 four footers wired in series with a XLG-150-L-A. That’s 136 watts of strips.
After the post about parrallel vs series… is there a comparable driver for doing this in parallel instead?
No solid answers here, I’m still learning and practicing with excel.
Confirming the numbers you probably already know.
1120mm - 4footers.
560mm - 2footers.
You could use the the XLG-150-H if wanting to run them in parallel and yes you could run 5 of the 4 footers if you wanted, and you would have some room to overdrive them a little as well, that or add a 6th strip and under drive them a little “10% or so” and then the driver is maxed out if running at full.
I dont know how you find these things lol, I thought I looked through the whole list. I may run a 6th strip, but its probably not necessary I think her current lighting is putting out about 30-40 watts total… if that.
Besides the difficulty of pushing stranded wire into the strip, is there any reason not to use it? Mainly for the ease of routing the wires
Tinning the tips is no problem
It’s ok to use stranded, it’s just a pain to get it in the connectors.
If you solder the ends of the wire it’s a bit easier, but they still bend between the solder and the gap before the wire coating starts. If you can grip the wire with pliers on the soldered part and plastic wire coating, they should go in easier.
I go straight to Digikey.
You can search by part number or category search and use the filters (a good high speed connection helps a little).
If you are working the filters, the PDF button on the left gets you the data sheet or once you zero in on the part look for the datasheet button top right.
Bare stranded wire is tricky to use as it is very easy to not get all of the strands into the connector and then bad things are likely to happen. 
Tinning works well to control the strands but using solid wire is 'idget proof’.
Cheers
G
