DIY Cheapskate DIY LED Stealth grow

[SoggerMom]

The total square footage of the interior is 48 x 14, so roughly 4 square feet.

My lights are going to be spaced 6'' apart, giving me 40 watts of daylight white and 40 watts of warm white per square foot, 80 watts total.

(Is this a desirable amount of light? Should i space them 2" farther apart to leave room for a lighting upgrade such as red LEDs?)

 

[F.N.]

This is cool I will be watching to see how you get along very interesting to see bud grown with a DIY led and cabinet

 

[SoggerMom]

If I may.. Did you DIY the circuit, or was it a found design?

I found the design. I've been trying to learn the basics of E.E. but it's so very complicated!

http://diyaudioprojects.com/Technical/Current-Regulator/

In my research, I've found a more efficient design using cheapo transistors, can't find the link at the moment, but it's supposed to be more efficient. as it sits now, since I'm running 4 (3.3v x 4) in series the LM317 isn't wasting as large of a percentage or voltage (1.25volts) as it would if I were only running 1 led. (I tried that though, just to see, and that heatsink got hot very fast dissipating 9 volts!)

It's all a learning experience!

 

[Waximus]

When I started building tube amps a few years ago (vintage stereo midlife crisis...), I found this site a regular visit: http://www.allaboutcircuits.com/
Thanks for sharing the circuit link Love this stuff!

 

[F.N.]

This is cool I will be watching to see how you get along very interesting to see bud grown with a DIY led and cabinet

 

[SoggerMom]

This is cool I will be watching to see how you get along very interesting to see bud grown with a DIY led and cabinet

Thanks Farlynew! This won't be my first grow ever, but I'm rather rusty since I haven't had too much under my belt and it's been 3 years since i last grew. This is also going to be full of new techniques and high tech parts which I've never used before, so mistakes will be made. I also have never grown autoflowering plants before, so I'm glad to have this forum here as a reference!

I used to have a room where I grew medical plants for friends for a crop, the cost ended up abut $30 an ounce for quality buds. I'm hoping after a year at this I'll be able to lower that to $5 an ounce to produce or less.

My future plans for This current box is to have it all Arduino controlled. I'm growing in dirt at first (why get too complicated in the beginning?) but my final plan is to have a SWC design with a freshwater reservoir topping off 4 individual SWC containers. My control panel will have LED readouts to monitor temperature, PH, EC, and whatnot. I currently do not have the parts to build all of it, but it will grow and become perfected with time.

 

[SoggerMom]

I think my power supply just died on me.

I had a nice rough build of my LED, connected it, then my power supply started stuttering (lights/fan flickering on and off) then stopped.

It will be a pain to fix.

The LM317 is NOT the Current Regulator I need. It can't handle anywhere near the current I need. which is 5.4 amps, it only supports 1.5 amps. I should have known! I need to find a new regulator.

This Build Is On Pause...

while I go watch and read for a million hours @ http://www.allaboutcircuits.com/ (thanks for that link, Waximus) I can't invest any more money this particular idea until figure out what I need.

When my seeds are ready to be planted, I'll start a grow journal and use the better camera

 

[snaffles1]

That's some LONG pause man! ☺

Sent from my Vodafone Smart ultra 6 using Tapatalk

 

[soggerman]

Yes, yes it was. Sadly, I couldn't recover from certain catastrophic failures of electronics.

the issues I faced were lack of a complete knowledge about how certain electronics worked.

1. My PSU was a computer power supply. I just shorted two wires to make it turn on. This caused to intense of an energy draw, which is fine and safe for a short period of time, but extended periods causes failure. I didn't know I should have shorted it with a Resistor.

2. The amount of material I was using for the heat sink, was far less than I needed for passive radiation.

Now I'm getting back into the saddle to relearn everything and plan to start from scratch with a higher investment.