Ever passed by LED Christmas lights and watched them flicker across your vision? Or a car with LED tail lights as you scan your vision rapidly? Drives me up the wall.
Same deal with PWM dimming. LED Christmas lights are typically 120Hz because they just pass full rectified AC across the diodes. And unlike a monitor that refreshes the image at 60Hz, the LEDs go from 0-100%-0 due to their ~microsecond response time. I’ve got flashlights using PWM for lower modes with refresh rates markedly higher than 190Hz and it’s noticable whenever the beam crosses something shiny.
I’ve thought about it, but time constraints are killing me. 9+ hours a day on the clock, 90+ minutes commuting, home life all make their demands on my time.
EDIT:
So a picture is worth a thousand several thousand with megapixel inflation words:
The present system, covering the driveway. Spits out more markedly more light than the twin-head floodlamp fixture that was originally located at the J-box location and does so rather evenly; the white garage door plays a significant role in this. The whole system is nominally 1200 lumens while consuming perhaps 15W.
Detail of a fixture. Literally a
3-up LED MCPCB, a cheap aluminum sample jar, and a chunk of aluminum barstock all adhered together with thermal epoxy. Pigtail from each pair of fixtures connects end-to-end in the J-box with respective
+ and
- leads going to a
microdriver. They’re not pretty, but they’re also quite low profile and barely visible from the street. Next iteration I expect to remove the other wire along the trim and the wire channel so I can snug them up as close as possible to the trim.
Edit 2: And since I’m up stupidly late for work anyway
(don’t work in production support IT, kids), here’s what it looks like at night, looking little different than when it was installed in December of 2010 going on 8 years ago.
I am seeking to do something mechanically similar to this, only with 10-12 fixtures. Due to difficulties I experienced when first installing this system, I’m not interested in compound series of LEDs and intend to limit current on a per-fixture basis. A simple DC power supply (or two) of sufficient wattage should be ~$20 all told. 1W resistors are extremely cheap. I’ll eat the driver savings and more on quantity and optics; I’d like to do wide spots on the corners and elliptical floods for the rest.
