My maplight died the other day so I bought a replacement bulb from kragen. It was a peice of crap and yellow and not a bright as the OEM one...

so I went on Ebay and bought some LEDs. I triend soldering them to a the old base after removing the glass but that took 3 hours and finally the tip of my cold heat broke :-(

I was depressed about 2 hours then took a shower and decided to build my own damn lightbulb out of paperclips, paper, superglue, and LEDs. Here's the result:



It doesn't seem to be any brighter but hell, it looks better

 

superbrightleds.com

 

hahaha, nice work MacGuyver

 

lol....funny....

 

u should get a perf. board, throw like 15 led's on there it would be easier than glue and paperclips and a lot brighter

 

Update:
I went back today and added 2 more banks between the V of the original eight. Now I have a W16

 

lets see it with the cover on at night

 

LOL i did the same thing.. except mine does not work..

 

very funny! NICE CREATIVITY THOUGH.

 

http://www.vqpower.com/v2/modules.ph...howpage&pid=87 check this out MetalMax did a write up I have one of his dome lights and its very very bright but nice work on a quick fix

 

way to ghetto rigg it... wow.... i hope u used some resistors cuz if u didnt that mess wont last long...

 

Eh? no resistors man. each 4 LED in a group is wired in parallel to each other and each of the four groups that are wired in sequence. That puts 3V on each.

 

looks ok not that bad

 

look man..... u always use current limiting resistors when using LEDS... ill watch ur ghetto contraption burn up and next week you can ask me how to do it properly.

 

do you even know what you are talking about? resistors reduce voltage not current. and if you have 4 leds that need 3V on a 12V source there is no need for a "current limiting resistor". a voltage surge (as super unlikely as it may be) would fry an LED whether there is a resistor on it or not since the surge would still push the voltage going through the resistor to the LED above the required value. resistors arent surge protectors.

 

look man... ill put this in terms you can understand... leds will suck current out of the source..ok the ones ur using are probably rated at 20mA.... and u being as smart as you think, u are thinking that they are just gonna run on that? Keep thinking that as they keep increasing the current consumption to over 50 mA and one burns out.. its all it takes, in ur retarded setup u need one to fail.. the current will spike and the rest will burn up as well.....

 

F550, no need to get mad. Despite you insulting my setup, I'll be nice and educate you. First I'll give you this equation R=V/I where R=resistance in ohm, V=potential in volts, and I=current in amps. This can be re-written as RI=V

Yes these are 20mA LEDs rated at 3.4V therefore, their resistance is 170 ohm. Since R is constant, if V is increased to 12V, I would become 70.6mA! Causing them to burn.

That is why there is a resistor connected in series to lower the voltage(and therefore the current). To get a 20mA current, on a 12V source, a total resistance of 600ohm is needed. Since the LED is 170ohm, a 430ohm resistor is needed(in case you don't know, total resistance may simply be added http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_...allel_circuits). Now Added together, the other 3 LEDs total up to 510 ohm-- more than enough. The total will become 680ohm. This makes the current through each LED 17.65mA when wired to a 12V source.

Now since my setup consists of 4 parallel LEDs in series with each other. Rt(total R in parallel is given by 1/Rt=1/R1+1/R2....1/Rn)=170ohm and It 70.6mA distributed across 4 LEDs which is 17.65mA. When one dies, R of that section becomes 56.666ohm while the others remain the same(42.5ohm). The total resistance becomes 184. ohm. This means a I=65.21mA across the 4 LED for each sections.

This means 16.3mA(this is lower than normal) for each LED in sections without any burnt Leds and 21.7mA for each LED in the burnt section. In case you didn't get the message, this means that it is impossible to burn more than 4 LEDs.