Hey everyone, this seems like a great community and I'm hoping to get a bit of help with something.
Full disclosure, I'm getting back into electronics after not really doing anything major for almost 10 years.
So I'm building a very basic prop for a friend - a lightsaber. It's nothing fancy - just needs to basically light up when you switch it on. The tricky part is all the electronics need to fit into tube that's about 1-1/4" diameter and 12" long.
I'm using a high power LED for the light source - red 2.6V @ 700mA. To power this, I settled on an 18650 battery due to the higher voltage, decent capacity and it -just- fits in a clip inside the hilt. Bonus: it can be re-charged so it saves money on that front. I would have used a 9v, but it was a little too big.
Initially I planned to just hook up a couple resistors in parallel as an interim solution as well as a heatsink on the LED and then place an order for a micro driver. The saber won't be on for long periods of time - likely turned on for photos then off (maybe 30-60 seconds at a time). However, I've been wondering about using a regulator. My local store has a few adjustable step-up/down ones that are small enough they would fit. I've just never used one before, so I'm not certain how to hook them up. They have a Ground, Shutdown, Input and Output. I get Input goes to +Battery, output goes to +Led, then Ground goes to -Battery along with -Led?
I need to get this done in about a week and I live in Canada so a lot of US supply stores (LED Supply, etc) are going to take too long to ship or be ludicrously expensive. I have a really well stocked local store.
Thanks in advance for any help!
Full disclosure, I'm getting back into electronics after not really doing anything major for almost 10 years.
So I'm building a very basic prop for a friend - a lightsaber. It's nothing fancy - just needs to basically light up when you switch it on. The tricky part is all the electronics need to fit into tube that's about 1-1/4" diameter and 12" long.
I'm using a high power LED for the light source - red 2.6V @ 700mA. To power this, I settled on an 18650 battery due to the higher voltage, decent capacity and it -just- fits in a clip inside the hilt. Bonus: it can be re-charged so it saves money on that front. I would have used a 9v, but it was a little too big.
Initially I planned to just hook up a couple resistors in parallel as an interim solution as well as a heatsink on the LED and then place an order for a micro driver. The saber won't be on for long periods of time - likely turned on for photos then off (maybe 30-60 seconds at a time). However, I've been wondering about using a regulator. My local store has a few adjustable step-up/down ones that are small enough they would fit. I've just never used one before, so I'm not certain how to hook them up. They have a Ground, Shutdown, Input and Output. I get Input goes to +Battery, output goes to +Led, then Ground goes to -Battery along with -Led?
I need to get this done in about a week and I live in Canada so a lot of US supply stores (LED Supply, etc) are going to take too long to ship or be ludicrously expensive. I have a really well stocked local store.
Thanks in advance for any help!