The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning

Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.

The New Hotness

  • LED Forward Voltages

    Thinking about those batteries in the context of a really big LED tail light for a bike leads to wondering about the variation in LED forward voltages; it’s possible to drive LEDs in parallel if they’re well-matched for forward voltage. A quick-and-dirty test is in order to get some first-pass numbers… and I have bags of nominally identical red and amber LEDs.

    Applying a fixed voltage that produces 20 mA through 14 randomly chosen LEDs of each color, then measuring the voltage across each diode:

    LED Red V Amber V
    1 1.895 1.939
    2 1.893 1.921
    3 1.903 1.918
    4 1.895 1.921
    5 1.891 1.918
    6 1.935 1.906
    7 1.891 1.926
    8 1.904 1.930
    9 1.901 1.923
    10 1.894 1.927
    11 1.901 1.914
    12 1.894 1.939
    13 1.901 1.933
    14 1.903 1.925
    Minimum 1.891 1.906
    Average 1.900 1.924
    Maximum 1.935 1.939

    Pushing 20 mA through the five lowest voltage red LEDs requires 9.54 V. Applying that voltage to the five highest red LEDs produces 18.2 mA.

    Putting those two strings-of-five in parallel with 9.52 V produces 40 mA total: 16.6 mA in the low string and 19.9 mA in the high string, all measured with a fancy Tek Hall effect probe. No, those aren’t reversed and, yes, I did check twice: it makes no sense at all.

    Temperature matters a lot in such measurements and I wasn’t controlling for that, plus I didn’t have a constant-current supply. Better numbers await better instrumentation, but I think binning a couple bags of 100 LEDs based on forward current should be straightforward.