I recently started designing a pcb for flashing lights I want to use in a pavillon at festivals, garden parties and the like.
Now my question is, can anyone tell me which kind of LED that has the most lumens/watt?
- 5mm clear LED's
- Clear surfacemount PLCC LED's
- 1 or 3 W LED's
I've previously experimented using 12-15 5mm which turned out pretty good as a "mini" spotlights, but I have no experience using highpowered LED's.
I want to build the poormans buck as supply on the back of the PCB, so I thought the surfacemount LED's would be the best, but only if they perform "okay" in terms of lm/W.
Note: They will be powered from the same large 12V batteries that runs the music.
--- EDIT ---
Yeah, I should definately have given more details. Im looking to make dance-lights in RGB colors as well as white for a strobe and perhaps UV. Number of channels doesn't matter too much, as long as I have at least one for R, G and B.
I AM on a budget, but not too tight either. My original plan was to have 4-6 PCB's with 50-ish LED's each (enough to make a lot of light in the dark), which is why I preferred 3-cent LED's over 50-cent ones.