Have Arduino control the dimming of 120-3 watt high power LEDs.

Other Hardware Motors, Mechanics, Power and CNC
1

I am making a DIY LED light and need to know if it is possible to control four different colors of the LEDs and have them go from 0 to 100% and back down to 0% to resemble the sun. I have the drivers to give power to the LEDs, I just need the dim-able drivers to be controlled. How would I go about making it? :~ :~ :~ :~

2

PWM (Pulse Width Modulation). It's a very common method of controlling the intensity of LEDs.

3

Great. Can that be done with Arduino?

4
5

I went to the link. How do I build it?

6

Arduino Power stuff here: http://arduino-info.wikispaces.com/ArduinoPower

You might consider these opto-isolated Power FET boards: http://goo.gl/4RQFy

DISCLAIMER: Mentioned stuff from my own shop...

7

I like that but being new to electronics I would need help with it being explained as far as building it.

8

I would need help with it being explained

Look at: http://arduino-info.wikispaces.com/ArduinoPower#DC which shows an example of dimming an incandescent 12V lamp, and sample code to test it. Same thing can be done with LEDs, with the right circuit arrangement and current limiting resistors.

9

Could you provide a link or more details as to what type of "dimmable driver" you're using?

10

I am using 4 of the dimmable drivers you see in this kit. (I got two more to add to the kit.)

11

Those power packs support dimming via an external resistor, no need to muck around with mains voltages etc. A simple and cheap digi pot can interface i2c/spi/(some wacky shift register thing) to get the nice power supply to do the dimming. Something like a Mixed-signal and digital signal processing ICs | Analog Devices has 4 outputs on a chip that costs a couple bucks and does not involve being exposed to mains voltages (though something with more than 64 levels might be better I just looked quick for a through hole 5v part)