DC Controller with Car Headlights

[PyroN8]

Does anyone have any experience using the 16 output DC controller with highbeam headlights from a vehicle. I am specifically interested in the ability fade in their intensity. I have ideas to use them for a 4th of July show next month.

[J_Plak]

Let start with Ohmlaw Basics hear PyroN8 wrote:

Does anyone have any experience using the 16 output DC controller with highbeam headlights from a vehicle. I am specifically interested in the ability fade in their intensity. I have ideas to use them for a 4th of July show next month.

[J_Plak]

Let start with Ohmlaw Basics hear PyroN8 wrote:

Does anyone have any experience using the 16 output DC controller with highbeam headlights from a vehicle. I am specifically interested in the ability fade in their intensity. I have ideas to use them for a 4th of July show next month.

[J_Plak]

Let start with Ohmlaw Basics hearPyroN8 wrote:

Does anyone have any experience using the 16 output DC controller with highbeam headlights from a vehicle. I am specifically interested in the ability fade in their intensity. I have ideas to use them for a 4th of July show next month.

[J_Plak]

Let start with Ohmlaw Basics hear with a highbeam headlights from a vehicle draw 100W @12V =8.33 Amp each you will need a 800 w or 66.64 amp power supple for group of eight channels. Safely we can say this will not work, as this is way over the controller handedly limit!!! http://www.the12volt.com/ohm/ohmslaw.asp

[Dr. Jones]

I think your best bet would be to try and find some Pars and use them on a regular LOR controller

[Guest wbottomley]

Joe Ayo on PC has several junk cars in his display. The purpose for them, I'll never know, but you might want to shoot him an email.

But, what Jerry posted above, is right.

[evan.a]

you got to love political correctness.

[-klb-]

Not that I have any interest in doing this for my display, but I picked up some parts today.. I've always thought that the way the DC card is set up might be ideal for driving a larger transistor to handle higher current loads. I picked up a few TIP36C transistors (rated 25A) today, and hopefully I'll get a chance to play in the next week. They do have a downside in that they probably take about 3/4 of a volt for the transistor, limiting the maximum brightness of the light, and creating a fair bit of heat to dissipate, but the transistor can be mounted near the load, minimizing any extra heavy gauge wiring needed, and spreading out the heat that is generated. Do always remember to fuse the circuits as close to the positive battery terminal as possible, and ensure the full path is adequately heavy gauge for the current in the load. The transistor will need to be in the path from the load to ground, and the ground potential has to be the same as for the DC card.. However the only current through the DC card will be the base current causing the transistor to switch.

- Kevin

[PyroN8]

J_Plak wrote:

Let start with Ohmlaw Basics hear with a highbeam headlights from a vehicle draw 100W @12V =8.33 Amp each you will need a 800 w or 66.64 amp power supple for group of eight channels. Safely we can say this will not work, as this is way over the controller handedly limit!!! http://www.the12volt.com/ohm/ohmslaw.asp

Thanks for the advise but I am fully aware of ohms law. You shouldn't assume that one does not (tsk, tsk). We'll chaulk it up to my lack of adequate information. So here you go.

The 4th of July show is actually a Fireworks show, that I am hoping to tie in lights to. I have been in the choreographed fireworks business for several years now, but just got into X-mas lighting last year. The show is for a small community with a large pond. We use several pontoon rafts when electronically lighting product and for my finale I want to bring in some lighting. For the start of my the finale I am using THX intro and I wanted to fade in with a couple highbeams on each of the 5 rafts. The power supply would be a 12volt car battery (separate form controller power) to run two highbeam headlights for the thirty seconds of intro. Just two lights per raft was my plan, at eight to a controller I would surely blind my crowd. As I stated though I am new in the lighting world and I am not familiar with the true limits of the DC controller. I have yet to purchase any of them so I was hoping that someone with experience in fading with at least one high beam would say "go for it" before I make the purhase.

[-klb-]

Not sure if you have seen the formal documentation about power handling...

http://www.lightorama.com/Documents/CMB16D_Man_Web.pdf

Page 6 according to acrobat, labeled page 11, and the graph on the page labeled 12.

The graph shows that at 8 amps, the MOSFET's are dissipating 25W.. That's a lot of heat lost to switching.. Maybe with just one channel in use per bank, and a heavy aluminum angle as a heat sink you might be OK, but it would be a good idea to look up the MOSFET and see if it is rated to dissipate that much heat...

I think headlights are one of the cases where using the card to drive a secondary transistor will result in less power dissipated by the electronics, and the TIP36C is also designed to dissipate a lot of power if necessary. It is a TO-218 case, and rated to dissipate 125W into a suitable heat sink..

- Kevin

[Guest wbottomley]

Jeff Millard... LOL!

You could use MR-16's to accomplish this.

Annalisa is the expert of LED's and MR-16's: crazylightlady.us

Check out her site.

[Dr. Jones]

LOR is planning on releasing a board for controlling high power

As mentioned we do not have anything in print for the DIO32. Very roughly.... it has 4 - 8 channel ports. Two of the ports can be used for servos (16 servos total). Each of the ports can be used to control a partner cards that control HighPower AC (over 10 amps per channel) Low voltage AC, Electro Mechanical Relays and other stuff.

So with the card you could control 16 servos (directly plugged into the card) and have two ports remaining for lights or other stuff.

Dan

I'm sure you could run the lights on AC, (incads don't care) at 12V allowing you to run them from a pool transformer

[-klb-]

1st pass test with the TIP36C looks promising.. So far, I only tested with a 20W MR-16 bulb, but it worked great. As expected, there was about a 0.7V drop across the transistor, but only about 11mA flowing through the DC card while the lamp was drawing about 1.6A at 13V.. Dimming worked great. In the few minutes I had it running, I think I warmed the heat sink more by touching it to check it than the power dissipation did. After all, in this case it was only dissipating about 1.2W.

If the 0.7V transistor loss remains constant as expected, you could handle 10A, only dissipating 7W on the transistor.. I'll try to draw up what I did. Once it is ready I'll post a link to it here.

I'll see what I can do about scaling up to a higher wattage test. This was done against a power supply only good for up to about 60W at 13V, so I can easily test against a 50W MR16, and I'll see what I can put together to test against a car headlight...

- Kevin

[-klb-]

Here is a quick sketch, and some more commentary on my test with a TIP36C and the 20W MR-16

http://www.lightsonharbor.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=123:handling-high-current-dc-loads&catid=43:electronics&Itemid=2

- Kevin

[-klb-]

More data has been posted to my link above. I have now tested with a pair of 50W MR-16 lamps, giving 8.2A of load. This resulted in the transistor dissipating 8.6W through the heat sink, with the heat sink getting up to 140F. Voltage loss through the transistor was up to 1.05V, with 97mA going through the LOR DC card. I would probably recommend a bigger heat sink for use longer than a couple minutes at a time.

- Kevin