You'd want a fully regulated power supply for this, /especially/ because it's discrete. You want the LEDs to remain constant brightness, but, more importantly, you don't want an unregulated power supply to overvolt and destroy all this hard work.
I think this falls apart in the details. LEDs want constant current power supplies, and their owners frequently want them to dim. So you will still need a power supply.
You can fudge it with resisters like in an LED strip, but you lose efficiency and dimming quality.
That being said, I expect that power supplies with 48VDC input or so would be cheaper.
So much of the problem with LED lights is from the integrated power supplies. Why is it not more common by now to just wire up indoor lights with 48v DC supplied from a PSU in your wiring cabinet and the lights can be just plain LEDs? Lower overall cost, more reliable, safer.
LEDs draw lots of power. I just put ~~50W~~25W of SK6812s in my 3D printer enclosure. (It's overkill, but not drastically so.) So you're going to need big batteries for any LED project.
WS2812 LED Strips on AliExpress/Alibaba/BangGood are sorta okay. I've got a few of them at home, some of them have LED's shortcircuited after they failed.
To some extend you get what you pay for but they're good enough for most purposes (and if they go too much kaputt you can replace them with another one for the same low price) and fairly bright too (about 0.25A of LED per meter and 30LED/m density)
"It's also difficult to find the 048Z available in single quantities"
Just ask Nichia for an engineering sample. :) Boom, free sample if they've got one for you to utilize. I don't know how many Cree, KingBright, Nichia, Osram, and Epistar LEDs I've got just because I ask to test them.
As for the 50V power supply, it'll run on a 48V 1.25A driver. You'll be fine and those are about $20 each.
Lots of material out there on on using WS2811/2 LEDS for Christmas lights. A Raspberry Pi is a little overkill; a ESP8266 / NodeMCU running WLED will do you just fine. Reddit's r/led is filled with these projects, or check our DrZzs on YouTube who has a ton of detailed guidance.
If you really want to get serious with WLED, check out the new Quinled-Dig-Octa boards. Super affordable and hands down the easiest way to get thousands of lights setup. 50-100A of LEDs, no problem! You’ll spend more on the power supply than you will on Quindor’s top notch boards.
That is an orthogonal concern, the two aren't really comparable. It would be good if the LEDs didn't burn out, and it would also be good if we didn't have to throw away both parts when one failed.
12V requires quite a lot of amps for enough light, so low DC is not optimal. Also LEDs are current driven devices, i.e. they will be sensitive to voltage changes (even with a current limiting resistor)
You can get WS2811, which is the driver chip without an LED. You can hook that up to any RGB LED in any form factor. It's more expensive and requires more PCB space, but you get flexibility in LED placement.
Yes. I have several lights comprised of LED's and simple power supplies I built ages ago. They are dirt simple, but probably not as cost effective to make. Mine use a small transformer, full wave bridge rectifiers, a couple capacitors and a few resistors in parallel. Nowadays, you could make a small switching power supply, like those found in laptop power supplies, but smaller... but I know that won't happen because the bulb would cost several times more.
I am currently using a Fovitec Bicolor 650 LED panel - it was cheap and I am cheap. I replaced the power supply with a higher-wattage unit because it flickered at max power, that might be enough to make me not recommend it but it works for me.
I previously used some adhesive LED strip lights on a 24x24 plate of aluminum. If DIY electronics are your aesthetic, go for it!
LED bulbs usually use the most basic of power supplies, the capacitive dropper[0], the downside is that they tend to die easily.
Also, the LED diodes themselves will often be multiple in series (a string), or series-parallel (several strings in parallel) depending on the bulb, that end up needing more than just 2V, anywhere from 12V to 60V or so per string of diodes.
Sometimes the high power diodes being used are themselves a series chain of diodes on a singular piece of silicon encased in a blob of phosphor, so that the diode package ends up needing 12V or so. These are often referred to as 'COB' diodes.
(apologies for the RAS syndrome, but saying 'LE diodes' or just 'LED' to refer to the individual light elements when talking about 'LED bulbs' is too confusing otherwise)
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