Today, we finished up the wiring of the LED lights in the bathroom and had our first test of an actual install of our new DC lighting system. When we tested previously, it was just temporarily put in place as a proof of concept. But the concept was proven and we wired it up and here is what it looks like:

These are two LED’s mounted one each above the toilet and sink and two more, one mounted in the middle of the bathroom and the last over the shower. They are shown here running at 24V DC and current limited to about 850mA, for a total of about 20W. The result is a nice warm light that is actually more bright than I would like, but this is fine since the microcontroller firmware I wrote supports using a cheap encoder we bought off of eBay to use as a dimmer.

In the previous proof-of-concept test, we had a heat problem, but this seems to have been resolved with the use of a larger aluminum plate as a heatsink. It isn’t so pretty, so we can consider improving the aesthetics later, but it works. I didn’t have my trusty IR thermometer on me today, but it was only slightly warm to the touch after an extended period of time on. I’ll check the actual temperature after a longer time on another day. Now that it is in a permanently installed state, this should be fairly easy to do.