chancewokc wrote: ↑Fri Oct 12, 2018 4:42 am
I am going off of the strip Build design on the main page...
Are the 90cri cobs?
I have never built an LED before.. I did a lot of research several months ago but I have had so much information overload that's most everything you guys are saying is a foreign language to me. I like the lec spectrum I am just wanting to supplement because of the loss on sides and corners. I don't think I have the mental capacity to really learn all of the physics.
.. Trust me I tried. I don't really understand all of the par values and Michael moles and Spectrum. And all of the electronic calculations that go along with it. I have taken in so much information lately I feel my head is going to explode.
I think everyone has their reasons to go the DIY route, and the reasons vary. Although my life situation allows me to put lotsa energy into this right now, there are lots of areas I had no interest in focusing on. Luckily there are people who seem interested in the very things I'm not.
Right now my main interest is side lighting, and exploring leds potential for that. For other needs I leech of the forum or google.
If you are starting a business, you need to worry about more then your potential for physics. You need godspeed, and an ability to delegate everything that others can do more efficiently... Its a hard balance.
The PAR and PPFD etc. are made to seem more complex then they are. Naturally those with a great math head will flaunt their calculating skills, but finally in any such areas you need to focus on practical significance... the world is full of experts who gain a lot of power by technical language use, making simple things seem complex, to make you dependent on their services.
In the case of this light there are a few practical points:
Desired light level at the plant (notice how hard it is to get solid numbers? it means something!)
Total output of light/ driver (before expressed as lumen, now with a host of plant specific terminology)
How that output gets spread onto a canopy (quite easy to approach intuitively, and you already got the main point of balancing light at the edges.)
So if you know your target light level, and the lights total output, you can divide the output by area, and see if that is close to your target.
For the edges what I did was reduce strip spacing by 1.5cm as I moved outwards. I have no PAR meter, but I know the raw numbers so I can work pretty well from those estimates.
I would not focus too much on the technical stuff, if its not calling you. Every person online who seems good with that stuff has spent years on experimenting to bridge their theory with practical application. In the last three years I have been contacted by a few projects doing large scale greenhouse farming, which ignited the interest in light placement for me. I'm not just doing it to get a bit more weed
