I recently bought 25 Yellow Super Flux leds and I want to find a schematic that will illustrate putting these leds in series. About 4 of them. This is for a 12V DC application on a motorcycle. If anyone has any ideas of where I can locate something like this I would greatly appreciate it.
Connecting superflux LED's in series is no different to connecting any other LED's in series. I'm assuming these are those little square LED's? There are 4 pins on each LED, but as you can see by looking through the plastic, the anode and cathode feed straight through. The notch is the cathode. The sticky at the top of this forum will tell you how to connect LED's in series. And remember the forward current for these LED's is between 50 and 70mA.
No real difficulty with connecting them in series. I have blue superflux LEDs in my car - One of my circuits uses 3 in series, the problem is that the combined Vf is so high that very small variations in supply voltage make big differences to brightness. If I turn the radio up loud (just a normal CD-player head unit, no amps or fancy stuff) the LEDs dim visibly with the bass-line. A second circuit used strips of 2 in series - this had much more stable brightness, but needed more resistors, and the resistors got much hotter. The amber and red have lower Vf so 4 in series should be practical, but are likely to show the same fluctuating brightness as my strip of 3 blue ones. You may find that strings of 3 in series work better. You'd probably find that a 100 Ohm resistor for each string is about right. You're unlikely to get full power with that resistor, but it should work satisfactorily first time, and won't burn out your LEDs You can of course adjust the resistor up-or-down as required. Also don't forget that superflux LEDs get hot - if you want to run a group of them at maximum power you need to consider how you are going to cool them. For my first circuits, I put loads of solder on and around the cathode pins, with the intention that this would act as a heatsink. For my later circuits I designed some PCBs which had 'floods' of copper around the cathode pins.
