LEDs and L5504AMP

I've read a few threads on LED lighting, and one of them suggested using the L5504AMP, although I'm not sure exactly how. At the risk of sounding long-winded, here is my situation.

I've got a string of 10 flush mount LEDs that are mounted around my balcony. They came in a kit from Beacon Lighting, and include a 12VDC power pack and control unit. The controller has a dial which controls on/off and then colour change speed. There are 4 wires, obviously gnd,red,blue,green.

My original thinking was to simply hook up the power pack to a relay output. Only drawback is I still need access to the control unit, and whenever the unit is powered up, it defaults to red. So if I want to turn on the lights to white, I need to turn them on, then adjust the colour change speed, wait for white, and then dial it back to "pause".

So I now want to bypass the supplied controller and adjust the 3 levels myself. It would be great to just plug each one into an output of the L5504AMP, but I don't think that it will supply the current the LEDs require. So will I need some intermediate device to power the LEDs?

 

If you dont require any kind of dimming for the LED's, I'd suggest pulling apart the controller for them, stripping out everything but the power supply and current-limiting resistors, (so in other words, removing the brains/color-changing sections), and once you have the lights all running directly (so in other words, having all 3 colors on full), just connect the system directly to a cbus relay, and you should be fine.

That is unless I've missed something important....

 

Oh yes, something very important. What if I want them blue? Or red? Or green? Or purple? Or orange?

 

Lol,

Ok, here's a few more options for you then:

1) Replace the button/knob on the control unit with a switch that allows you to select which color/combination of colors you want. That way you'd have cbus control, and you'd be able to select which color/s you wanted.

2) Build 3 new power supplies for the LEDs, and connect each one to each strong of same-colored LEDs, hook each one to a seperate cbus channel, and you'd be able to control them individually, although that would be one very expensive LED system using 3 cbus channels for control...

3) (And probably the best option) You could completely scrap the existing power supply/controller, buy a LED dimming module that accepts 0-10v analogue input, and connect it to a L5504AMP that way, although that may not be entirely cheap, however it would give you the ability to colour-mix any combination of the LEDs that you wanted. However you cant hook the LEDs directly to the L5504AMP. You need some kind of specific LED dimming system that dims the LEDs using PWM, and accepts a 0-10v input/dimming control signal. As well, because the L5504AMP is a 4 channel unit, you should have no problem hooking it up if you buy 3 of the LED dimming modules.

All I guess I'm trying to get at is that the current "brains" for your LEDs need to be scrapped, because there isn't any easy way of controlling them from Cbus with the LED electronics in-circuit.

Here is a couple of things I found after a search on Google that might help point you in the right direction if you're interested in option 3:

http://www.intl-lighttech.com/htdata/otrgb-module
http://www.lumotech.com/sys/fileadmin/Web/Gebruiksaanwijzingen/Dimming_LED_Lighting_EN.pdf

Darpa

 

Ah haa! That Osram Optotronic module is exactly what I'm after. Nows I just gotsa source it from somewhere.

Thanks!

 

No worries, glad I could help.

Darpa