We weren’t so happy with our options for outdoor DC walkway lights so we decided to try buying normal AC walkway lights and hacking it.

We decided to buy this model from HomePro for hacking:

(The photo here is at HomePro and shows it with an AC 220V compact flourescent bulb inside for display.)

It is one of the larger ones in terms of support pole diameter which provides us with space to put in things like an RS485 driven microcontroller based smart dimmer.

It costs about 1100 THB each, which isn’t totally cheap but is on the cheaper side of the HomePro selection.

So first we gutted it and removed the AC light bulb holder. Then we took our 7W LED modules we bought from eBay and mounted 4 of them onto aluminum L pieces as both mounting and heatsink:

Then we mounted this LED assembly into the light pole:

And tested it.

It was really ridiculously bright. This test was run at about 24V

for about 29W total.

When we took it outside, it was really uncomfortably bright. I think we will try fewer LED units per pole for the next test.