Using High-Power LED Lights
QUICK SUMMARY
If you're reading this article while looking to purchase one of our high-power LED lights, here's the quick takeaway facts you need to know before buying:
- High-power LED lights will not work with coin cell battery power supplies.
- Aside from our coin cell power supplies, any of our other power supplies will work with high-power LED lights.
- For best results powering high-power LED lights, use our USB-C power supply.
- Connect, at most, four high-power LED lights to any one power supply. If you need to run more than four high-power LED lights, use more than one power supply.
- In general, high-power LED lights are not compatible with our lighting effect controllers (though read below if you want to use high-power LEDs with a lighting effect controller-- this is more of an in-depth topic).
For those looking for more in-depth details about using our high-power LED lights, read on.
INTRODUCTION
This article describes the special considerations when using high-power LED lights. One of the great features of these types of lights is their super-high brightness, but with this high brightness level comes high power consumption: high-power LED lights typically consume ten times as much power as one of our Pico LED lights. This means high-power LED lights won't work with certain power supplies or effect controllers. We wrote this article to help you get the best performance out of your high-power LED lights, and we encourage you to read it before using any of our high-power lights.
POWER
The first consideration when using high-power LED lights is the amount of power they consume. As mentioned above, a single high-power LED light can consume as much power as ten of our Pico LED lights, so you need to plan your power supply accordingly.
Tech fact: Our high-power LED lights are tuned to consume around 200 milliamps (200mA) at 5 volts, which is one watt of power. Almost all of our other LED lights operate at around 15-20 milliamps.
What this means in practical terms is that you cannot use any of our coin cell battery packs to operate a high-power LED light. Coin cell batteries were not designed to produce enough power to run a high-power LED light.
Of all the power supplies shown in the photo above, the 3xAAA battery pack (on the left in the photo) will provide the shortest runtime. You won't damage the LEDs or the batteries, but the high-power LED lights are likely to drain the batteries in several hours (or faster, depending on the number of LEDs connected and the types of batteries used). For the longest runtime, we recommend our USB-C power supply.
If you have four high-power LED lights connected to a single power supply, we would not recommend connecting other lights to that same power supply. If you need to power other LED lights or other Brickstuff components in addition to high-power LED lights, we recommend using a separate power supply for those.
This section explained the various options for powering high-power LED lights: those that were recommended and those that were not recommended, as well as how many high-powered LED lights to connect per power supply.
The next section is for customers looking to use high-powered LED lights with Brickstuff lighting effect controllers.
LIGHTING EFFECTS
Since our founding in 2011, Brickstuff has offered lighting effect controllers (LECs) with different lighting effects pre-loaded and different options for controlling speed, intensity and other aspects of the lighting effects. Some of these LECs are capable of driving high-powered LEDs directly, and some are not. This section will describe both categories of LECs.
Effect Controllers Not Capable of Driving High-Power LEDs Directly
Most of our currently-available LECs are not able to drive high-power LEDs directly. These LECs each have six output ports and one pre-programmed effect:
Expansion Boards
Several of these LECs support expansion, meaning you can expand the effect by connecting "smart" expansion boards called BrickPixel driver boards to a connecting plug on the LEC labeled "OUT".
Note that only three LECs support expansion: the flickering fire LEC, the Theater Marquee LEC, and the Antenna Beacon LEC.
For LECs that do support expansion, we offer an expansion board with three plugs called BRANCH09HP (HP for "High Power"):
These expansion boards use special three-wire connecting cables. Make sure you purchase these at the same time you purchase the BRANCH09HP boards-- our standard 2-wire connecting cables (used to connect lights) will not work with these expansion boards.
When using expansion boards, you still need to keep in mind the general power guidelines outlined in the POWER section above: connect a maximum of four high-power LED Lights to any one power supply.
When using the BRANCH09HP expansion boards, you will not be able to connect high-power LED lights to any of the first six plugs on the main LEC board itself, though you can still connect regular LED lights to any of these plugs.
Helper Boards
For LECs that do not support expansion, or in cases where you don't want to use an expansion board and want to make use of some of the first six plugs on the main LEC board itself, we created BrickPixel "helper" boards:
When using helper boards, you still need to keep in mind the general power guidelines outlined in the POWER section above: connect a maximum of four high-power LED Lights to any one power supply.Effect Controllers Capable of Driving High-Power LEDs Directly
Up until 2022, we sold our Single-Function Lighting Effect Controller (the SKU for this was TRUNK01), which looked like this:
This LEC had two outputs, and any customers that still have these LECs on hand will find that they will drive high-power LED Lights directly from their outputs.
Because this LEC uses our legacy "large" connecting plugs, a large-to-small conversion adapter board is needed to change the large output plugs to match the small plugs used by the high-power LED lights.
While not specifically a lighting effect controller, our touch switch is capable of driving high-power LED lights directly via its single output:
FUTURE PLANS
Over time, we plan to add to the range of lighting effect controllers capable of driving high-powered LED lights directly, so check back for any updates to this article.
THANK YOU
We hope this article has been helpful. If you have any questions, please send us an e-mail and let us know how we can help. You can also comment directly about this guide below.
If you make something really cool with our high-power LED lights, please share on social media and tag us (@brickstuff on most platforms) so we can see your awesome work!
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