Team Eventorizon: Build Diary

[overkill]

Do you have a link to the 48V LED? A nominally 50W high voltage LED is made up of strings of LED elements on the same chip and looks something like this:



If that is really what you are proposing, its quite dangerous! A 50W LED is about the same as a 250W incandescent light and is blindingly bright - looking directly at it for even a short time is not good for your eyes.

I don't see what the problem is with using lower voltage LEDs off only one battery or with a larger dropping resistor. even if you use a very bright 1W LED, the pack supplying it will only be slightly more depleted after 3 minutes and since you are charging the packs separately, that pack will just take a fraction more charge to be back to full and equal with the other pack.

I looked up the specs. on a 60,000 mcd LED that is unpleasantly bright to look at and from a 22.2V 6S pack it needs a 680 ohm, 1W resistor. Total circuit power dissipation is only 29.3mA, which is totally insignificant. If you wanted to run the LED off 48V, you just need to double the resistance and power rating. The closest common part is a 1.5K, 5W resistor.