Electronic Design and Family Site

LED Lighting for the Lazure Home Office

The Lazure LED Homebrew Light Strip

This Christmas, a local big-box hardware store offered LED light bulbs for $1 each. I bought about a dozen and converted my entire home to LED lighting...except my home office. That light was 3 Hockey-Puck-style Fluorescent fixtures that are usually very dim in the winter and year-round take 15 to 20 minutes to warm up. At 9 Watts each, their 27 watts seemed like an easy target for an upgrade.

I played with LED lighting in my recent Radio Operating Position and discovered it is very easy to implement. The lighting I installed there was simple "task" lighting though, while in this application I needed more general room lighting. I assumed that more LEDs = more light = decent room lighting. I was right.

I placed a total of  140 LEDs on 5 separate strips.  The combined power of these strips is 10.5 watts. I powered it from a 15V power supply that calls itself 90% efficient.  This "fixture" ended up considerably brighter than the original puck lights for almost 1/3 the power, and no warm-up too.

Schematic of the Lazure Homebrew LED Lights

A segment of PCB

Example PCB of the Lazure LED Homebrew lights