What's the max voltage for a high powered LED?

Other Hardware General Electronics
21

Does your high power led scheme going to use resistors of a high enough wattage rating to control the led current? Usually high power leds draw too much current to use simple resistor current control and is why constant current drivers are almost always a requirement to use on them.

I guess technically I could get resistors with a high enough power rating then I wouldnt need a driver, correct? But your saying thats not really an efficient way of doing things? So this is the purpose for the constant current driver to stop the led from drawing too much basically because it wont stop drawing on its own.(man why did that take so long to sink in :~)

So I just cracked open my current driver, see some caps, diodes, some parts I've never seen. I have an old laptop charger that overheated, are these drivers overly difficult to create one on a breadboard? My last question, when the RGB is only outputing RED, thats only 400mA, what about the driver stops it from from drawing the full 700mA? Thanks for the explanations btw, and the patience. For some reason that drawing current part just really went over my head.

22

AllenI:

Does your high power led scheme going to use resistors of a high enough wattage rating to control the led current? Usually high power leds draw too much current to use simple resistor current control and is why constant current drivers are almost always a requirement to use on them.

I guess technically I could get resistors with a high enough power rating then I wouldnt need a driver, correct?
Correct
But your saying thats not really an efficient way of doing things?
Correct
So this is the purpose for the constant current driver to stop the led from drawing too much basically because it wont stop drawing on its own.(man why did that take so long to sink in :~)

Correct again!

So I just cracked open my current driver, see some caps, diodes, some parts I've never seen. I have an old laptop charger that overheated, are these drivers overly difficult to create one on a breadboard? My last question, when the RGB is only outputing RED, thats only 400mA, what about the driver stops it from from drawing the full 700mA?

A CC driver measures the current that is being attempted to be drawn from it and if over it's set value it will lower it's output voltage to maintain it's set current, and if the device tries to draw less current the driver will raise it's output voltage to once again force the current to it's set value. That's why it's called a constant current driver as it works continuously to maintain the same current to the load by raising and lowering it's output voltage to maintain the set current. You can take a CC driver that is set up to supply say 300 ma output and short it's two output wires together and still only 300 ma will flow through that short circuit.
Lefty

Thanks for the explanations btw, and the patience. For some reason that drawing current part just really went over my head.
Your welcome.
Lefty