this is my favorite spectrum - full spectrum white pumped up at 450 and 660nm. It looks good to our eyes and has extra red & blue for the plants.
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yeah i think samsung are making HLGs boards now? they’ll probably drop some fixtures first, then i imagine the Chinese manufacturers will have them shortly after.
So it is not going to be a 1 chip solution for spectrum. They are offering a ton of spectrums to flesh out the whole of the PAR map.
Still exciting!!! And we are now on the front page of Google when you search LM561h !!!
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MIne too. And easily achieved by adding a few of our 455/660nm red/blue X2 SolStrips to your X2 build. Would be nice to get it all in one chip or interchangeable chip family.
The whole issue with mono color booster chips has been their different voltage and thermal requirements, requiring separate circuits and often separate PCBs and even drivers from the white chip PCBs. And price, being 3 or 4x white chips. Samsung has a history of great “second wave” innovation, taking others’ tech advances and refining production and distribution processes to increase quality, durability and availability while reducing costs and market pricing. Let’s hope that holds true for the hort LED market.
Just the 288 chip board, a stop-gap measure to provide some kind of stock for customers during their almost year-long move to bring their PCB production stateside. It can’t be very economical for them to be outsourcing to Samsung, unless they are getting very reduced diode pricing.
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i think their samsung boards are made in asia still. earlier they were looking at purchasing a pick and place machine (which was like 500k) because paying a USA manufacturer meant they had to charge $150 per board (aka doubled the price) so i guess the samsung deal was the best way to ensure quality while keeping the ‘made in china’ price
damn and i just bought new 561C boards not too long ago … maybe i can unload my fixtures to someone locally who wants to set up a garden so i can upgrade mine at no cost to myself 
Growmau5 and Green Gene’s garden talking about the LM 301h and the new Samsung chips. He already has a reel and got surprised about their existence with no warning as well.
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Nearly all of Samsung’s LED fabrication is in China, which is the irony? hypocrisy? of their “Made in the USA” promotion. Even when and if they ever get their half-million dollar machine up and running in Florida they will be soldering China-made diodes on China-made PCBs. So much for American-made. They should spend some of that half-mil on some plane tickets and a Rosetta Stone - Mandarin edition CD instead of indulging the Chinese xenophobic trolls on RIU. I tried making the X2 red/blue strip in the U.S. Best bid I got was from a well-known specialty LED maker in Texas, which came in at $86 per strip, just to produce - design and shipping fees not included.
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i think it has more to do with shadiness of the suppliers, they probably got ripped off a few times from their suppliers … so that way they’d be ordering diodes direct from a reputable source and ensuring what they are selling is exactly what they’re advertising … all they can skimp fabbing the PCBs is what, copper? i’m not sure how expensive sphere testing is but i imagine they found a few that weren’t “up to spec” during the process and suffered a loss
Sphere testing isn’t for Q/A, the process isn’t conducive to mass testing of product stocks. It’s meant for testing individual light engine designs. There are faster and cheaper ways to detect out-of-spec or counterfeit inventory. I think HLG’s problem was the all-too-common one (in China) of the fabricator-turned-direct retailer, given the plethora of QB knock-offs flooding the market. That and a not-exactly-unique design.
As for the PCB, it’s half the product and where all the ingenuity, innovation and fabrication quality differences between LED strip/board products are found. Samsung supplies the diodes and controls their quality and design. The rest is the province of the board/strip producer, and it lives in the PCB. So in many ways, the PCB is everything. The diodes are generic. And yeah, skimping on the copper, or the trace widths, or ally backing, using old pick-and-place machines, etc., all makes a difference in the quality of the final product.
So I get their goal. I just don’t know if the solution is to take fabrication in-house. There are plenty of quality fabricators with state-of-the-art equipment and practices in China. You just have to get off Alibaba and find them, and develop a relationship.
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