Powering multiple (7) RGB LED amplifiers

[thatpurplestuff]

Hey guys, I've got 7 of these bad boys that need to be powered:



So I bought 7 of these 12V 5A 60W Power Supplies for them:



I've tested them and they work great, but it seems a bit ridiculous to imagine this many power supplies all hooked up and tucked away in my Skeeball machine (technically I'll actually have 2 more power supplies since I have a couple RGBW amps as well).

Would buying a larger power supply to hook all of these up daisy-chained or something be an option or should I just plan on making a little power sanctuary tucked inside my machine?

Any advice would be very much appreciated since I really don't know what I'm doing haha!

[Zebidee]

You can buy splitter cables for that kind-of power supply and connector. I recently did so, they were cheap, have got some right here. I got two splitter sets (1 to 4) with both male and female connectors, as well as some breakout connectors with both genders. These connectors are designed with LED strips, CCTV etc. in mind, but obviously can be used for anything compatible.

For now, all I really intend to do with this is to split a 12v supply between an 2x50cm LED strip marquee light and and audio amp, for which 5A is plenty.

For your projects, just estimate how much power each circuit uses, and add it all up. To be on the safe side, is good if the power supply rating (5A) is about double that or more. If power supply still runs hot, add another power supply to split the load.

The connectors in my pic are 5.5*2.1mm.

[thatpurplestuff]

Thank you very much for that info Zebidee!  That definitely gave me a place to start... I've calculated the total draw for everything and I'm thinking I'll split everything into 2x 4-way splitters and then have the largest load (the entire ramp) have its own power supply.  Some of the Amazon reviews I've seen of the splitters are that they shouldn't be used for anything higher than 1.25A per split, but hopefully that was just because the power brick they were using was 5A (1.25A x 4 = 5A).  I've got one LED stretch that will need about 2A at full color/brightness, but hopefully if I pair it with the LED strings that are way smaller (each about 0.5A) I won't have any issues!

The total draw at full brightness would hopefully only be about 3.5A per power supply so I'm thinking 5A should work fine for each?  I guess we'll find out! 

[lilshawn]

why not buy one 20 amp power supply and run everything off that?

but also???

why do you have that many RGB amps? can you not just use one controller for them all? you can get a 20 amp controller for about 40 bucks and that will do about 2 amps per meter for the high density 60 LED's per meter variety (~0.6 amps for the cheapy 10 led's per meter variety... ~1.2a for the 20 led's per meter variety)

for the cheapy led's thats over 33 meters of cheapy led tape and about 10 meters of the high density 5050 tape last i heard the project was just illuminating the rings and maybe the sides of the alley? 10 meters would probably do it.

chances are you aren't going to run the tape in white mode 100% brightness, you'll be PWM'ing 1 or 2 colors so probably 1/3rd to 1/2 that current in use. if you roll 16 million colors, you'll hit peak load for a short time.

i mean, do what you want, it's your project.... i just think it's a little overkill having 7 RGB repeaters for a machine.

[thatpurplestuff]

why not buy one 20 amp power supply and run everything off that?

but also???

why do you have that many RGB amps? can you not just use one controller for them all? you can get a 20 amp controller for about 40 bucks and that will do about 2 amps per meter for the high density 60 LED's per meter variety (~0.6 amps for the cheapy 10 led's per meter variety... ~1.2a for the 20 led's per meter variety)

for the cheapy led's thats over 33 meters of cheapy led tape and about 10 meters of the high density 5050 tape last i heard the project was just illuminating the rings and maybe the sides of the alley? 10 meters would probably do it.

chances are you aren't going to run the tape in white mode 100% brightness, you'll be PWM'ing 1 or 2 colors so probably 1/3rd to 1/2 that current in use. if you roll 16 million colors, you'll hit peak load for a short time.

i mean, do what you want, it's your project.... i just think it's a little overkill having 7 RGB repeaters for a machine.

For the 20A power supply, I would love to do that I just didn't know how to safely split the power that many ways and didn't want to fry myself or set something on fire haha

The reason for the 7 RGB amps is because each ring needs to be individually controlled via LEDBlinky through an LEDWiz.  The outputs on the LEDWiz won't provide enough juice and I didn't think there was a way to amplify all the different signals at once... right now it basically goes:

LEDWiz Ports 1-3 -> RGB Amp 1 -> 10 Ring
LEDWiz Ports 4-6 -> RGB Amp 2 -> 20 Ring
LEDWiz Ports 7-9 -> RGB Amp 3 -> 30 Ring
etc etc

I hope I'm wrong but I just thought that I needed to amplify each individual RGB signal after it left the LEDWiz, if there is a way to amplify all of the unique signals using one amplifier that would be freakin awesome!

[lilshawn]

that's sort of what those amps do. you feed in a signal from an led controller, and it basically reads the signal and it re-iterates the "signal" to additional lights.

really all you are doing is turning off and on a switch to ground for each of the 3 colors.

you would normally use these on something like an RGB led string going around the roof line of a building... one controller could certainly not do 500 meters of LED string, so you put the maximum amount the controller can handle (say, it's 60 meters) you then take the end of the string, and feed it into one of these amps to the input with it's own power supply. you continue the string on the output of the amp for another 100 meters or whatever your amp and power supply is rated for.... and so on into the next...the next... until you reach the end.

by the sounds of what you are doing... personally i would have just built a circuit using something like P40NF10L or IRL540N mosfets and just controlled the gates with the LEDwiz.

the P40NF10L will handle up to 100 volts and 40 amps continuous and the IRL540N will do like 36 amps.

if you open up one of your amps, you'll see 3 fets being used to drive the outputs.

[thatpurplestuff]

Thanks for this detailed info lilshawn, I never would have even thought about doing it like that!  If you don't mind I might copy some of your post into my build thread to provide any future builders with information to avoid a huge cluster of amps haha.  I've had these RGB amps for too long to return so I'm just going to make it work with these, but your circuit idea definitely seems like the better more elegant solution!