Thread: LED's for lightning Effect

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I was wondering if anyone has thought about making a custom light using multiple bright LED's for the effect of lightning? I know that photo bulbs are popular but it seems that LED's might fit the bill. Not sure of the responsiveness of LED's though.

Check out eBay for some really high-power (0.5W, 1W) LEDs. There's a few sellers based in Hong Kong. You can string a bunch of these in series to get even higher output. If I remember right, they're about $1.50 each in low qty. Here's another option, if you're looking for color. I was actually thinking of making exactly this kind of board, before I knew it existed.

As far as the responsiveness of LEDs, I'd venture to say they're even faster than xenon strobes... not that it matters at that point. But LEDs turn on in a matter of billionths of a second.

Do you know how you plan to control them? If it's only lightning you're looking for, just a relay would work fine. If you're looking for more control (dimming, etc), you might want to check out my 'Medusa DMX' board (link in my sig).

- Hook

I was thinking about putting together a cluster of LED’s for the light. I was going to run them through a lightning fx box.

LEDs are generally low-voltage devices. There *would* be a way to run directly from 120AC, but I'd reccommend hooking your lightning box up to a 120V relay, and then hooking the LEDs up to a DC power supply, switched by the lightning box.

Alternately, there are some places you can get standard Edison-based LED bulbs now. You could use a few of those, and drive them directly from the lightning box.

- Hook

im going to try to make one i just have to buy the LEDS. its going to be a 12VDC to power 50 regular LEDS which are super cheap.

You can use a 12v output 110w wallwart. I collect those old power supplies from various junk for this. I hadn't tried a daisy chain of LEDs (pos-neg, neg-pos, etc) without a resistor, but the voltage of each combined to equal 12v in principle ought to negate the need for a resistor. Your limiting factor would then be the amps on what the supply will support. I'm no electritian but from my playing around with them I've had pleanty of success, and hey at 12v your not likely to electricute yourself (though from experience I can tell you it does tingle LOL).

So, along these lines..... I would like to use LED's to light some of my props in our haunt.
I don't need to string a lot of these together but just want a touch of light to light up a prop here or there without lighting up the whole room. And with out having a 'big' bulb that I need to hide. My question is: I know how to wire an led with a resisitor and I know how to figure the resistor size but I DONT know about the leds themselves... such as, what I need to look for for brightness. I see some that are more of a spot light and some that are flood.
Can anyone help direct me on what to look for? On ebay it lists all kinds of numbers and all.... I think some of this is size? But then what part of this do I look at for brightness.

@ Yubney
For powering LEDs you'll always want to limit the current somehow or another. The resistor on LEDs isn't to drop the voltage, it's to limit the current in a controllable manner. In some cases, one might be able to get away with no artificial limiting of current... but not all the time, and not forever

@ Lynn,
Sounds like you're curious about both dispersion (flood vs. spot) and brightness. Dispersion is usually in the LED description as a number of degrees (how wide the beam is). Spots are on the order of ~40degrees or so, whereas floods can be ~120degrees. As far as brightness is concerned, this is a tougher thing to estimate, since it's hard to know exactly how much brightness you'll need. Generally, the brightness in an LED description will be in millicandellas (mcd), watts (W), or lumens (lm), but like I said... it'll be tough to know how much brightness you'll need for your scene. The upside, though, is that you can limit the brightness of an LED by lowering the current to it (increasing the resistor value). I would reccommend trying out some of the normal sized 'superbright' LEDs (5mm), as I think that's what a lot of people use, and then maybe get some 0.5W LEDs (even brighter) for good measure.

- Hook

Lynn, here's a really good how-to for making LED spots from hedg12 on Haunt Forum:
haunt the yard: LED spots

Sorry for getting off-topic...

So.... A super bright is not as bright at a .5W ? Some of the listings don't say the wattage..... Gets me confused

Thanks Otaku..... thats a great idea. I think thats exactly what I will do. Man am I going to have to buy lots of 12v wallwarts!