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Rainbow Flood power


Jason Burge

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Has anyone used Rainbow Floods with LOR without using a dc card? What I was thinking about doing was plugging wall adaptors into the normal LOR controller, but im not sure if the constant turning on and off would mess up the adaptor or power supply. Any suggestions?

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The "normal" LOR controller of which you speak is an AC board, meaning, it switches AC on and off like a light switch in your house.

Rainbow Floods are DC LED's. If you plug them into a "normal" AC LOR board, you will SMOKE the lights in a nanosecond and damage the controller.

You MUST MUST MUST use DC power for the Rainbow Floods. Either a LOR CMB16DC (screw terminal strip) or CMB16DC-QC (spade lugs) controller, or just plain ol' 12volts DC (battery, wall-wart, PC Power supply, etc)..

Do not.. Repeat, underlined, bolded, blinking.. NOT plug those lights into an AC controller!!!


And you can not use a wallwart to power an AC controller.

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What he was asking was, if I understand correctly, is..could he use an AC controller, and the AC controller channels toggle the lights via a wall wart....output of the wallwart being 12 VDC.

Short answer is no...variety of reasons...but consider you are not just turning channels on and off when using an AC controller...it's not like a mechanical relay..it's a triac circuit.

Do yourself a favor and invest in a CMB16DC...

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The fact that the rainbow flood takes up 3 channels for RGB would mean you would need 3 wall warts one for red, green and blue. But then this is not recommended and doubt you would be able to achieve any decent fading control which is important for creating colours with RGB lighting.

Some people claim that they run wall warts through an AC controller without any issue when running light strings, but this is definitely not recommended and can compromise you LOR controller outputs and the wall wart.

So save up those dollars and buy a DC controller if you intend on running DC floods and lighting, it really is the only way to go that will work reliably, any other way is taking short cuts and leaving yourself open to failures during show time.

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When you use the CMD16 dc do you have to buy a seperate ac-dc transformer to power the controller and all of the channels ...like maybe a computer power supply or something like that.

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also I am a little concerned about the cat-5 cable being used for power (seems a little wimpy) I think that I should only run maybe 2 lights max on one cable and just run several cables.

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Yes, you need a DC source for the Controller, which will drive the floods too so make sure it has enough output to do both. Spec sheet not in front of me but the controller doesnt draw very much. One rainbow flood with all LEDs on is about an amp though.



I have one set running off a converted desktop PC power supply, this is a cheap alternative if you have an old desktop sitting around.



The other set I bought a laptop power supply on Ebay, about $10 including shipping. It is 4 amps.



There are other bench and project type supplies out there.

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Really didn't want to have to buy a dc controller just for 3 channels (rgb), but Im just thinking maybe I will use 3 channels for each light 5 lights 15 channels so they will be completely seperate from each other. Might turn out pretty cool.

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You can find all kinds of usable DC supplies on ebay....or mod a computer power supply. Another thread on here related to RFs has several links.

I'm doing 3 sets of double RFs in enclosures...so 9 channels altogether. Will be feeding them with separate cable for each, as they'll be in 3 different areas.

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I just skimmed through this but let me step in here.

In the normal course of events AC to DC wall warts or transformers are not designed to have varried voltage on them. It is either 110/230 volts constantly or they do not function correctly. Why? Well the transformer is made up of a bunch of different circuits containing a lot of capacitors. While the caps store electricity they will also not function correctly if the voltage continues to fluctuate.

With that being said, there are people here who used wall warts plugged into a standard AC LOR controller and ran their wall runners on them last year. He actually did a very nice show but I can't find the video to save my life. (I think it was Tom, toymaker)

So, obviously it can be done, but I really do not recommend using them. I strongly recommend using the Rainbow Brain or one of the LOR DC controllers.

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I just finished soldering and testing the third one. Testing them off the truck battery. Last night as I was testing the blues there were a couple of neighbors outside and they thought the police were out because of the way they were flashing--HA HA HA but so far so good with the floods they seem to be pretty bright.....better than the colored flood bulbs that I used last year for sure.

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I concur with Ponddude about the DC controller.

You can use a wallwart connected to a AC controller...just dontuse fade or shimmer or twinkle commands. On/off commands will be ok.

I have 2 sets of color changing twinkle stars that I use in my show, they have a walwart on each which has the color changing circuit and rectifier inside it. I have them connected to AC channels with on/off only. I sue a on time of at least 5 secs to allow the color/twinkle effect to take place.

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  • 1 month later...

I know this thread is a little stale, but I had a question about the rgb rainbows floods also. I read that you can daisy chain up to three , but what is the max length of the cat5e? This is my first year with the LOR CTB16PC hardware, and I just ordered 16 more channels. Now looking into getting the DC board and another 16 channels this spring. This stuff is addictive!

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You can not daisy chain 3 of them...the maximum to daisy chain is 2. The Rainbow Brain can control up to 3 per port, but the limitations of the cat-5 able will not allow that. If you put that many together you will see a noticeable drop in the brightness of the lights...not to mention the heat coming from the cabling.

I do recommend, if you are using the LOR DC controller, to put more than one jack on your set of channels. So for instance, you could have 2 jacks on 3 channels, which will give you the ability to control 4 floods per channel. You could easily put up to 8 floods per grouping of channels with multiple jacks.

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Greg,

Thanks for the info. Now I know how to plan my floods....just gotta buy them. Do you have the new super bright LEDs that I read about on your site? Looking to buy this spring for my halloween/christmas display. This stuff could really get expensive! Maybe my wife will count this as my mid-life crisis.

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All the LEDs that are used in the Rainbow lights are Superflux LEDs. There was a question about next years LEDs that was raised here on the forums. Next year all the LEDs will have the same mcd rating, which should help improve the color of all the LEDs. They will be available when all the next stuff is released in 2011.

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Greg,

Another stupid question for you, re the rainbow floods. Have you ever considered a version with screw terminals instead of the RJ45 jack? I was thinking (always dangerous to my wallet) that I'd like to use 18/7 sprinkler wire (max volts 30, max amps 15), which would allow me to have all my planned floods wired back to one location, and more than two daisy chained together. Planning on using the LOR 8 ch. DC board. A couple of benefits would be greater capacity/distance of cable run, as well as weather-resistant wire cladding that I can leave out year round (I plan on using the floods as landscape lighting- working on housing format- embedded in lucite/acrylic, low profile-any thoughts?) Sorry if this has been asked before- I looked on the forums and your web site, and didn't see it. As a newbie, gots lots of ideas that may be totally harebrained.



Kevin

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Kevin Leuenberger wrote:

Have you ever considered a version with screw terminals instead of the RJ45 jack? I was thinking (always dangerous to my wallet) that I'd like to use 18/7 sprinkler wire

There's nothing stopping you from soldering the sprinkler wire directly to the boards.

In the unlikely event that you have to service the flood in the future, you could always cut the wire and use gel-filled wire nuts to reconnect it.
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Steven,

You're right, I can solder to the board. Will probably end up doing that. I'll have to drill new holes for the wire, and then jumper over from the original tracings for the RJ45 jack- not enough room for the larger gauge wire. Was also thinking about continuing the run from that point also, so that I'm not pulling all that amperage thru the board for the downstream floods (sorry about the pun-couldn't resist).

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