LED-timate - Dimmable 9.8W LED Lamp (Incredibly Bright!)

A Short Story About These LED's

These LED's came from a warm white led tube which is made up of a SMD PCB strip inside a protection tube.

Right at that time, Our building decided to replace all of the fluorescent lights in our underground parking lot with LED tubes (These look exactly like fluorescent bulbs, But are more efficient and live longer), While installing the lights, One of them broke. Later that day, I found the broken bulb in our garbage room, And I knew it would be perfect because it had exactly the LED's that I needed for my project!

There will be pictures of the light while on, But sadly, My camera can't express the terrifically high lumen output and the "beauty" of the daylight colored LED's...

If you're interested in understanding more of what these led fluorescent replacements are, You can see more pictures of these link to Google Images.

And, If you're interested in buying these high efficiency led tubes you can get them here on eBay.

Step 1: Starting the Build

As you can see in the picture and maybe recognize, This was made out of a car windshield mount for a phone.

In the beginning I modified the phone mount so it could be a tripod, But it turned out pretty bad so I never used it again.

A couple months later, Well this was my idea...

Step 2: Power Supply Decision

All of the LED's on the strip are connected in series.

For powering the 1 LED I need 3 VOLTS, For 2 LED's I need 6 VOLTS, For 3 LED's I need 9 Volts, This goes on, and on, and on...

I had two options to power them:

A 12 VOLT power supply

Or A 20 VOLT power supply (From a laptop computer)

Powering With:

12 VOLTS: This means I need 4 LED's.

20 VOLTS: The closest possible is 7 LED's.

7 LED's obviously need 21 VOLTS, But 20 VOLTS meant that each led gets 2.85 instead of 3 VOLTS which is okay.

The reason I chose 20V and not 12V was because I really wanted to use this specific high quality heat-sink. If I used 12 VOLTS I would need to put the LED's in rows of 4 which would waste more space on the heat-sink (meaning less light) and I would need to buy a high AMP power supply because of the lower voltage. Another reason I chose 20 VOLTS was because I wanted to be able to have an option for adding more LED's In the future.

By the way, The whole strip itself has 90 LED's which all together uses 18 watts, That means each led draws about 0.2 WATTS.

Link for a 20V 4.5A Power Supply (eBay)

I don't need 4.5 AMPS, That's just the power supply I had, And except for the fact that the 4.5 AMPS power Supply Is a bit bigger than a 12 VOLT power supply doesn't really bother me.

Step 3: How I Connected the LED's

This part was really boring and took me a long time:

I scraped the plastic coating off the strip really carefully with a sharp utility knife to reveal the the insulated positive and the negative copper connections, so I could solder the connections after that.

Step 4: Soldering

As seen in the picture I soldered all of the strips in parallel so each strip would get 20 VOLTS (Not 2.85 VOLTS for each strip, Which would happen if I soldered the strips in series)

I also soldered a toggle switch in series from the power supply to the LED's.

Step 5: Epoxy

I glued the led strips to a flat aluminum piece using heat conductive epoxy to help cool down the LED's

Step 6: Hot Glue

After gluing the LED strips with epoxy to a thin piece of aluminum, I glued the aluminum plate to a heat-sink (I took apart from a desktop computer) And then hot glued the heat-sink to the phone mount.

DONE!!!!!!

If you are wondering what my overall cost for this project is, The answer is: NOTHING.

All of the parts I used are parts I already had!

Step 7: It Works!!!

I Promise you that if you make one like I did, It will be worth every second it took you to make it!

Step 8: Detachable

A couple weeks after finishing the project, I noticed by mistake that I could detach the flashlight and I could hold it in my hand which is really useful when I want to take a well lit picture of something (like an Instructables project)

Step 9: More Pictures

Step 10: What Do I Usually Use It for the Most?

Regular Lighting: It's bright enough to light up my entire room
Reading a book
For Filming: Instructables projects, or random stuff.
Projects: It Is really helpful for me while Soldering, Taking apart electronic devices, Building, And more!

There Isn't a day I don't use it!