Led engine replacement

[Richard CSL]

There was somebody here about 6 months ago who was converting a pair of Clay paky HPE's to run on led.

 

I have recently been looking at 20 watt led engines on ebay for about 20 dollars each. Just wondered if anybody else has tried swopping ELC lamps with leds?

 

 

 

http://www.ebay.com/...=item19d0650dac

[greenalien]

Richard - thanks for the heads-up on these, looks very interesting, 1600 lumens for $20 is good value - so I've ordered one to play with, along with a collimator / lens set which it will certainly need, as the emitted beam angle from the LED array is 160 degrees. I plan to try it in a Chauvet DJ Squeeze, which uses ELC lamps, and if it works, I'll be buying more. I'll report any progress here.

[timsabre]

Richard - thanks for the heads-up on these, looks very interesting, 1600 lumens for $20 is good value - so I've ordered one to play with, along with a collimator / lens set which it will certainly need, as the emitted beam angle from the LED array is 160 degrees. I plan to try it in a Chauvet DJ Squeeze, which uses ELC lamps, and if it works, I'll be buying more. I'll report any progress here.

 

It looks kinda big... though it is very difficult to tell from the pictures and no measurements are given. For converting things to LED, the smaller the source, the better.

 

I was looking at the Bridgelux ES parts which are 2000 lumens for £20 (from Farnell).

[Stuart91]

A lot of lighting effects that use ELC lamps have a fair amount of space inside them. I'm thinking of things like NJD Datamoons and the Abstract Twister series. It shouldn't be impossible to add the LED engine to models with a similar form factor. Moving heads on the other hand will be a bit more of a challenge.

 

I'll be interested to hear how the brightness compares.

[sleah]

With the availability of LEDs and the lense sets, it can't be long before we see 'off the shelf' LED replacements for the higher power halogen lamps, such as ELC/ENH(?) that consist of the LED, electronics and lense in one package, meaning the lantern will just need minor internal mounting modification.

Such replacements may well be viable for lamps such as HTI, although in addition to mounting modification, there would need to be electronic modification to simplify the power source.

 

Some might say "why bother?" as it won't be long before there is a decent LED version of your fixture available. My reply is why replace when a simple modification will hugely extend the life of an otherwise perfectly good fixture?

 

Looking forward to hearing how you guys get on! :)

[timsabre]

A lot of lighting effects that use ELC lamps have a fair amount of space inside them. I'm thinking of things like NJD Datamoons and the Abstract Twister series. It shouldn't be impossible to add the LED engine to models with a similar form factor. Moving heads on the other hand will be a bit more of a challenge.

 

 

It's not space that's the problem, but collimating the light. The original lamp is pretty much a point source with a parallel light beam. The LED is very much not a point source and has a wide emission angle. The challenge is to capture all that light and get it going in the right direction.

[gyro_gearloose]

Collimating the light from a large LED die is easy enough. The collimating lens you've linked to is a good place to start. All you need to do is add a plano-convex lens and you've got yourself a decent set of condensing optics, more properly known as a Koehler (pronounced 'curler') illumination system. There's a good picture of the lenses in my converted Miniscan here.

[greenalien]

Well, we'll have to be a bit patient here, as delivery is likely to be a few weeks. Space inside the fixtures is likely to be the problem, of course - it's not just the die size, it's also the heatsink - although that may be susceptible to some modification.