Let’s face it, our light isn’t the best out of the box.
I removed the front cover to get a bit better light and was stunned by the insides.
Those SMD LED’s face upwards onto an angled reflector of white colour…
Don’t know how efficient this is other than diffusing the light better for the camera…
Anyway…
I tried some of the ‘dedicated’ light strips from a certain Chinese shopping platform…
All claiming to be happy with those 150mA the P1 light port allows for - all rather crappy in terms of light output.
Those strips are just not meant for the purpose of providing a flat angle of light - they spread too far.
Even these COB strips failed to impress me and so I gave up weeks ago.
Now I had a weird backlight strip from a TV - with 7.2V diodes on it…
Did not trust this cheap LED tester but my multimeter confirmed the readings.
It wasn’t the 7.2V that impressed me though, it was the simple design of the strip.
20 of those diodes in series and at full brightness (compared to full white on the TV) running on 84.5V.
White LED’s usually require at least 3.2V in the ultra bright classes.
But there are some reaching full level already around 2.2V and that at just 20 to 22mA.
5V is the supply for the LED port, 150mA our max.
2 LED’s in series gets us close enough to 5V without risking those LED’s burning out, but of course an added resistor is always good.
Means we have 22mA used so far, make it 25 in case those low current LED’s are unavailable.
With that we can put 6 of these pairs in parallel.
7 or 8 if we can get away with lightly less than 100% brightness.
So at least 12 very bright LED’s…
That would provide a meaningful length for a lightbar but also comes with the problem of beam angles.
Usually these LED’s are clear and with beam angles between 25 and 52 degrees.
Unless we sand the top a bit we still need some sort of diffusor to prevent glare.
Still possible…
Then I thought about what the actual issue here is…
150mA is the issue…
On 5V that means 750mW - any half decent flashlight these days already comes with 2W LOL
So we need a booster…
Not a problem in the world to find 5V LED lights - strips, COB light, USB sticks, whatever you can think about.
Including desk lamps, video lights and more…
Everyone has some old USB charger around that is of no good use with USB-C everywhere…
Even a lame 2A provides 10W !!
How to connect it to the internal light though ?
E-switch Mosfet Module of course.
3 to 12V on the input for the signal and next to no consumption.
On the output 3 to 40V with up to 22A…
More than enough for a little LED strip…
Control for the switch is wired to the original LED output.
And the switching part goes between power supply and LED strip…
Chamber light off, strip off, easy and while off you only have to worry about the standby power the USB charger might have…
Use a LED strip with app control or with IR remote and you can even change brightness and colour.
At this stage of my thought process I really started to wonder why a solution isn’t available from China already.
No problem to use a kapton film strip to get power through the lid and from there to the strip.
Without that one could even run some thin dual core wire through the poop chute to get light under the hood.
Has really no one tried this yet ?
