I have this LED panel I bought recently that I want to make smart. The panel has 6 LED strips in parallel, with 15 LED in series per strip. The LEDs are rated at 9V and 1W. I measured the current and this checks out (15*9V = 135 V across the whole panel, and 9V across each LED).
There are two channels – one for warm white (WW) LEDs, and one for cold whites (CW).
I want to be able to control the tunable whites of this panel + the intensity. I can already so manually (cf below), but i would want to be able to automate this process.
I was thinking of using a Zigbee LED driver, and some DC step-ups to bring to voltage from 24V DC to 135V DC (what I measured going across the LEDs). I am not super electrically inclined, so I don’t know if this is the right way forward… I want to be able to control everything via Zigbee ideally.
So what was the current (not voltage)?
These LEDs are weird, I expect them to be 2835, 3 series diodes in one. 1W would correspond about 100mA drive current.
I doubt you could use some constant current driver and step up the output. Either you need 135V driver or you try to regulate the output from original driver with some Esphome setup.
I meant voltage… I typed too fast. They are 2835 LEDs indeed.
The panel is rated at 72W max power output, so that would mean the LEDs run on 0.53 A, correct?
So I tried something… There is a manual switch on the panel which lets me manually adjust the colour temperature (CCT) between 5 levels, from fully warm to fully cold white. I connected the Zigbee controller to the warm and cold wires on the panel.
When I manually set the panel to “warm” (using its physical switch), the cold LEDs turned off. In this state, I was able to control the cold LEDs remotely using the Zigbee controller, but the warm LEDs remained constantly on. The same thing happened in reverse when I manually set the panel to “cold.”.
Do you think I could get to control both LEDs without relying on manually switching the colours? I feel like I’m onto something, but I’m not electrically inclined at all and simply goofing around won’t get me anywhere.