I know this is a different subject, but I would like to get your thoughts on the specifications for these 600TTL G&B lights I bought on Amazon. I finally found info on them. Hydro Crunch sells them through Home Depot. I asked about finding the wireless dimmer for them on another thread and the thread got ugly. Someone got offended about how I worded a reply and it just didn’t go well. You asked me to take pictures of the inside light. I did but forgot about the whole thing. They definitely are a lot brighter than the driverless COBs
Sure, I remember the thread. I believe I was asking for detailed pics of the drivers to see if I could identify the compatible dimming functions of them.
Other than having a spectral graph, the ppf is a real number that you should be able to compare to other grow lights. That’s photosynthetic photon flux, or amount of light the lamp produces within the photosynthetic absorbing range. Not to be confused with ppfd, which is the same measurement but confined to given area.
For reference, a single bridgelux vero 29 gen 7 has a ppf of about 230 umols at 100 Watts. There would be some variance to color temp and a few other things. But that’s a pretty popular cob here and I know the number off the top of my head. Most of the amazon lights don’t give ppf, just a reading from directly below the lamp. So it may be rather difficult to compare that way.
What I do see is 10k lumens at 300w which is horrible. epistar LEDs so it is kinda expected, but leads me to believe real wattage draw for the lights might only be around 200w or so.
The colored diodes usually have a higher par output than lumen output. So that’s pretty standard. I understand completely why the led manufacturers list luminous flux, but as the grow light manufacturer it’s pretty useless. I think it has to do with having some large number to throw on them. To somebody who doesn’t know any better, it seems great lol.
I just sent pics of the insides to @dbrn32. They have 2 x 3400ma drivers and 1 x 1500ma. If I just find the wireless dimmer. I want to simulate what the sun does late in the day. Especially at the end of flowering.
I traced the wires and they go to each color bank of LEDs on the - side. The LED 1 and LED 2 wires appear to be powering the module. I can see from my years working on RF spy equipment for the government that the module is some sort of simple RF controller. They may not be able to sell the dimmer in the U.S. if they don’t have a license for its frequency. I went to hydro Crunch web site and they don’t offer a remote for it.
Well that kind of sucks. Have you tried contacting them? I don’t really have any experience with that stuff, but perhaps there is something you can put in it’s place?
I’ll be honest, it’s probably not worth the trouble or cost if you can’t just get a remote. If you really wanted the benefits of dawn to dusk dimming, a far red initiator would probably give you similar results.
Don’t see the frequency listed on the module. I really don’t want to go to the trouble of building something to control it. It would be nice if the sellers would sell the wireless accessories with the light they sell.
It’s hard to say. Without specific specs on the diodes and tracing the amount of diodes in series and amount of parallel strings, we’d be guessing.
I’m sure they are under driven. But any increase in current will also bring an increase in forward voltage. Seeing how they appear to be using constant voltage drivers, that makes throwing a little more current at it kind of a guessing game.
You probably could if you had the pcb in front of you and the trace was exposed. Divide driver output current by number of parallel strings would give you ballpark of the current applied to each series string. Once you knew current per string, you could probably find forward voltage of the diodes. Reds typically 2-2.5 volts per diode and blues around 3 volts at 700ma, so we could probably even guesstimate based on the supplied voltage range from driver.
It’s the guesstimate part that I have an issue with. Would be one thing if it were me, in my shop or garage. But suggesting someone else do it is where I kind of draw the line. My experience with electronic components is kind of limited to this. But I have a couple of related degrees, and a journeyman’s card. So I’m just about qualified enough to get myself into trouble lol. I have a hard time giving people directions on things I’m not 100% familiar with.
