2 Comments

1. cronos51101
   10:09 on October 31st, 2009

   well for LED’s you should have a dc power source, what do you plan on powering it with? you can run it off of you household 120V AC power, but you will first need to make a simple Full Wave Bridge Rectifier, perhaps with a capacitor so they won’t flicker as much at 60Hz. plans for these can easily be found online. Now remember that LED’s only light when you apply power in the correct direction so you have to make sure they are all facing the same way. Depending on your power source you have to make sure that each LED gets the right voltage. first, how many volts are these LED’s supposed to take? if you have a 6 volt circuit and you LED’s require 3 volts to operate, you will want to connect them in series, that way they share the voltage. with 12 volts you would use 4 LED’s now say you have 8 LED’s and a 12v power source, you would make two chains as in the previous example and connect them in parallel. All of these terms can easily be found on Wikipedia by the way. Now if you plugged this into the wall you would need around 40 LED’s in series assuming you have 120V service and that you already made a Rectifier. This number can be reduced by using a step down transformer to reduce the 120V to a lower AC voltage, you would still have to rectify it into DC, but you would no longer require as many LED’s. Welcome to simple electric circuits.

2. b
   10:32 on October 31st, 2009

   You need to be more specific.

   Do you want to start from scratch using single LED’s in which case the truth is its not really worth it although it can be instructional, or if you want to use exisiting pre made lamps with LED’s don’t

   There is more to this than meets the eye, I appreicate what you are trying to do, but electricity is dangerous, it can KILL