Connecting battery to LED strip

Other Hardware LEDs and Multiplexing
1

Sorry for asking what must be a stupid questions but I have 220 LED hooked up to a battery and its a little lacking in power. Which is the best way to approach this problem, 1./ Connect a larger battery, 2./ Connect another battery half way down the LED strip (after 110 LEDs). The LEDs are 12v , 60MA (http://www.bliptronics.com/item.aspx?ItemID=88)

By the way, has anyone had any experience with these. Do I need to connect a resistor up to them ?

Thanks in advance,
Andy

2

60MA

Wow!!
Or do you mean 60mA?

Get a bigger battery.

3

If you're going to hook up 220 of these in one long chain, it's going to draw 13.2A (0.06A * 220 lights) which is a fair wack and certainly more than the interlink cables are rated for. Even wired up with rated power lines, you're going to have a short battery life - a 40AH car battery will only run this for 3 hours with all the lights on full.

4

Yeh its 60mA, and yeh its a lot of power. I was going to hook up 3 poly lith batts to it. It only need to work for 5 minutes or so. So I guess a battery every 70 Leds? Is that what I do? The LEDS seem to be designed to have 100's all connected together though. Maybe I'll just try one huge battery.

Thanks in advance,
Andy

5

So I guess a battery every 70 Leds?

Sounds like a plan.
Make sure all the grounds are connected together but do not connect the positive lines together. Batteries in parallel are not a good idea.

6

The LEDS seem to be designed to have 100's all connected together though.

Why don't you just ask the bliptronic people how long their maximum recommended chain is? The 22AWG wire can take 4.2A, so can the right lipo battery, but I'd still be suspicious about the internal construction of the LED pixel - exactly how thick is the PCB trace that connects V_in to V_out ?

Even an Arduino can run thousands with ease using just two data lines. Wires between LEDs can be extended up to several meters, but you may need to drop the data rates slightly. The interconnecting wires are 54mm long.

To me, this first sentence sounds like a marketing claim :roll_eyes: - technically correct, but slightly misleading in terms of complexity.

If "several meters" is 10m, then they're talking about a chain of around 93 units.

Pol.