Going LED!!!

This weekend was a rather industrious one for me since I was in a mood to fix stuff at home. It started off with fixing a damaged component of the car which would have cost over 15k LKR if went for a replacement. After this, I was eager to fix something else. Then I remembered that the fluorescent light based emergency lamps at home were giving trouble all the time, without serving the purpose. Their light was so dull and the emergency lamp was gradually becoming a decoration.

Then I thought, “hey, why not replace the dull tube with LEDs?!” Without a second thought, I got to work and formulated a quick and dirty plan. The lamp already has a chargeable 6V 4.5 Ah battery. So, my job is going to be really easy if I connect the LEDs properly without drawing out too much current from the battery and also without letting a high current flow through the LEDs which would bust them off instantly.

So, it was shopping time! Well, there’s nothing to exaggerate here. I simply bought 40 white LEDs, some circuit wire, soldering lead and a switch.

The light panel was the crucial element of the project. So, I took a thick cardboard and marked where the bulbs would go. My plan was to have two arrays of LEDs 20 on each array. 6V across two series LEDs seemed fine. Therefore, the entire light panel became a set of parallel connected two series LED units.

In this entire endeavor, I had an assistant who was very eager to help – my little sister :) . Since she also wanted to help, she was given the task of testing all LEDs to see whether they were working and she also helped to hold things in place while I soldered.

Once the light panel was made, I had to open up the lamp and make the connections to the power source. Since I had a rep to maintain, I needed to have something up and running before I left back to Colombo. So, my plan was to have the basic functionality up and running. Without any fancy stuff, I gave a direct connection to the battery and attached a new switch on the side of the lamp since the original switch was acting more like an insulator :P

And Voila!!! There’s my simply DIY project to make the emergency lamp LED powered!

This is not yet complete. I am yet to make the surface of the panel reflective and also need to run some tests to see if I can improve the power utilization. Let that be phase 2.

I know, this is not rocket science, but it was fun to get my hands on something ‘non-binary’ after a long time :)

Here are some snaps of the intermediate stages.