I stand corrected, thanks guys…
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Sorry i dont believe cree are made in the usa. They use china like almost everyone else. They do have some chips using leds from epiled but not many. The chips mau5 uses still arnt epileds though.
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I should correct that statement, They are an american company and they have production facilities in the USA but they did open a facility in china here is a little info:
Cree owns 204 acres in Durham, NC, where it has its headquarters, primary research & development operations, and a manufacturing facility. Its products are produced in Durham; Racine, WI; Florence, Italy; and Huizhou, Guangdong Province, China. They also maintain sales and support offices through subsidiaries in leased office space in North America, Asia and Europe.[2]
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Cree and Epiled are different companies. Epiled is considered a good, middle grade diode made in Taiwan and China. Cree, Luxeon, Osram are considered high end in color diodes, and Cree, Bridgelux, Citizen, Nichia and Samsung in white diodes. Most if not all have factories in China, but none of the top grade manufacturers produce solely in China (at this point). They maintain manufacturing facilities in their home countries of Taiwan, South Korea, Japan and US for economic leverage and quality control reasons, perfecting processes at home and then implementing them in their China ops.
There are a lot of “boards” out there these days. I agree with @HalfBee, the circuit engineering behind the board is critical. As is the engineering of the PCB. Anyone can solder chips to PCB blank. But without good engineering and quality production, grower misery will follow as diodes and whole strings burn out, thermal runaway set in, and $100 boards that should last 50,000 hours are turned to toxic waste in a few months.
@21stg.com hasn’t listed his board specs. I assume at 320 diodes of LM561C it tops out at 150w. The rest of the specs he mentions are taken from Samsung’s data on there chips, and don’t reflect actual performance on the PCB. Running a 150w board at 50 watts will definitely boost efficiency, but at the cost of 3x more boards. Good for the board salesman, board buyers not so much. Running at 1/3 rated power also avoids heat and current balancing issues in poorly designed boards that would otherwise toast them at full power.
SolStrips are rated at 48w, and built to run at 48w all day long - delivering up to 200 lumens/watt over a 50,000 hour lifetime. For $20. At 96 LM561C chips per, three would about equal one of these COB-beaters, but with the added flexibility of spreading out the light field to fit your space and deliver an even “blanket” of light across the canopy, with any mix of spectrum you prefer to create. The rest of the specs are available on the DIY with LED strips thread.
Coming in two weeks: 2700K and 3500K spectrum strips.
-b420
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Will these be for paralel wiring?
i might have to get some for my veg area … what country do they ship from ? I just got my quantum boards attached to the heatsink just need to wire the drivers to the boards, scrog my tent and let them veg and harden up for a week or 2 then flip em to 12/12 …
There’s several of these boards out and coming out. Anybody can contact a ShenZhen manufacturer via alibaba, pay the initial engineering/design fee, and have some lm561c diodes slapped on a board.
Here’s another one https://www.instagram.com/p/BZDHeGcnIsm/ plus he had the idea of waterproof optics… that cut 2% off your light output… eh
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I designed them with parallel wiring in mind, but there are series options as well.
US. But will ship worldwide. One of the design objectives was to create a lightweight, easily shippable component.
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I will have IP67 waterproofing in the near future - but not expensive lumen-stealing “optics” covers. These will be silicon-coated diodes. In the meantime I’m having good luck with acrylic sheeting to provide protection against overspray, etc. if not full waterproofing.
Photon Phantom makes some nice boards.
-b420
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Check out chilled led.
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Checked it out. Their fixture is a huge box of empty space for something that shouldn’t be more than a couple inches high. Also their board layout is: massive amount of concentrated LEDs, huge gap, massive amount of concentrated LEDs, huge gap – not an even spread of light. What makes them special? That lens treated with phosphors to adjust the green spectrum to reds, or something? Physically and spreadwise its not going to work in what I’m planning for my next iteration.
Credit to @Baudelaire he got the distribution right and the connects at the same end without a bunch of dead space. Oh and he didn’t forget the mounting holes like Photon Phantom. I’m still thinking LED tape ribbon stuck directly onto the aluminum is better thermal conductivity than PCBs though. Plus cheaper / diode so you can buy a bunch more, drive your lm/w efficiency up and run cooler.
Then again if you buy boards straight from Samsung you know they aren’t using counterfeit diodes, who knows with Chinese manufacturers.
And is the phosphor treatment thing even real? I’ve seen some COB light companies claim this yet their lenses look just like the ones you can buy on alibaba.
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idk man chilled led is apparntly killer. im not to into their specs or anything but ive listened to mouse preach about how good chilled led is.
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It isn’t, better that is. LED efficiency and lifespan is all about heat management at the diode, and the flexible tape strips use cheap thin aluminum, no copper layer at all, and no vias to transmit heat away from the chip. That’s why they are cheap, why they use current-regulating resisters every four or six chips, and that’s why they burn up long before they should. Yeah, you can buy 3X as much as you need and run them at 30% of rated current. Or you can buy properly designed PCB strips and get the intensity and thermal management you need to grow serious smoke.
Samsung doesn’t sell direct, it’s H and F Series strips are nice but not sized for many grow spaces - they are designed as commercial lighting retrofits, in meter and half-meter lengths. They tend to be expensive and somewhat difficult to find or buy in smaller quantities - believe me I’ve tried. My SolStrip fabricator is a certified Samsung reseller, he sends me the chip lot package labels:
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I think thin aluminum stuck right on the aluminum heat sink is plausibly more thermally efficient than PCB->aluminum->copper->PCB->paste/tape->then finally the aluminum heat sink. There’s no point to the vias because its already on the heat sink. And yeah, they are inexpensive because their manufacturing process is different. When you have more diodes you can run them at lower watts and get the same light at greater effeciency and less heat, so little heat you barely feel them get warm, people aren’t even using heat sinks just aluminum angle bar, c-channel, u-channel, square bar, etc. So thermal management isn’t a problem at all. And you say they burn out because of the current-regulating resistors that are protecting them from overcurrent? That doesn’t make sense, and that’s not why they’re cheap, the resistors actually add to their cost to manufacture. I haven’t seen anybody saying they’re burning out, at all, anyways they also sell constant current ribbons that don’t have those resistors (I don’t like the resistors myself because I think they lower efficiency).
That’s cool but logically if there’s some outfits in China making counterfeit LEDs then making counterfeit certificates/labels/packaging would be quite easy in comparison.
You must’ve not checked on it for a long time because the Samsung strips are actually sold in 4 ft, 2 ft, 1 ft lengths, and their prices have dropped to like $22, and digikey has hundreds and hundreds ready to ship immediately. I just hate where they put the connectors, your layout is perfect.
Let me exercise my psychic powers here… hmmm… remote viewing… I’m seeing a vision… moooo… cow? no… Moofoo? Mufue? Is your fabricator ShenZhen Mufue Technology?
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Vias transfer heat away from the diode to the sink, doesn’t matter how cool your sink is if the diode is overheating and the heat isn’t being transported away from the chip it will lower its efficiency and shorten its life. The resisters eat electricity and produce additional heat, which adds to the mitigation issues and yes, shortens diode lifespan. I can go on and on about cheap Chinese flexi-strips, but they are cheap because they are cheap.
Samsung makes some nice, properly engineered rigid LED strips with LM561C chip for flourescent retrofit projects, mostly. Therefore they are made in lengths to fit the job they were built for: 560mm and 1120mm. Not 2 feet and 4 feet. If those lengths work for your space, great.
I designed the SolStrip to work in many other situations where a 44" inch strip is impractical. It also has twice the diode density as the Samsung strips - they are better thought of as 1/3 of a Quantum or Photon Phantom board, which can be positioned and tuned spectrum-wise to suit the grower and the space, from 2700K to 5000K, with switchable early veg, late veg, bloom and harvest stage spectrum options, deep blue and far red enhancement, day-cycle blending, and so on.
As far as counterfeits and Chinese go, I love how the flexi-strip guys buying their lights for $5 a meter think everybody else is getting the counterfeits, but their cheap-ass, unbranded reels o’ light are beyond reproach. Samsung diodes cost $135 per 2500 lot bag - not a lot of upside to using counterfeits right there. My manufacturer shoots me of pic of the lot - if you know anything about Samsung’s product packaging, you know that they are harder to counterfeit than a $20 bill, and contain all the information in the lot code needed to verify their type, quality, date of production, bin, factory, and vendor who purchased the lot and purchase date. Does your strip shipper give you that?
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As a LED newbie, how can one discern the legit Samsung strips from counterfeits? It does seem within the realm of possibility that if your design is better than the original, your fabricator would copy it and start pumping em out at bottom dollar.
Not throwing salt, legitimately interested
Its a very common thing in Chinese manufacturing. They get an outsourced contract, and just produce more to sell on their own than the contract requires. Usually affects high-end designer products like purses etc. It’s their culture, they don’t respect intellectual property rights, plus they are out reach so there are no repercussions. It happens all the time.
Closing the topic for 7 days cool-off period.
I have removed last posts. There is no need for heated discussion (we are not in Shark’s Tank). In the meantime I’ll contact both parties privately and hope to sort it off.
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