Can those LEDs brighten up.....

Can those LEDs brighten up your headlights really bright and if so how can I do that?

Yea they do a great job of lighting it up. i put 2 leds in each part of the headlight. all you have to do is point it at the reflecters and drill the hole and silicon it in.

Not brighten, but they can light it up.

how do u get them pointed at the reflectors bend them? i was looking on radioshack.com and they have led holders. it looks like u can screw them into a hole and shi and i has wires that u can connect comming out of the back. i want to put green leds in my lights i wanna put like 4 in each muhahahahahhaah. but im hesitan to because i dont know how. and there should be any melting problems either right. cause it does get hot in the lights at times. i need a diagram

SuBXeRo wrote:

how do u get them pointed at the reflectors bend them? i was looking on radioshack.com and they have led holders. it looks like u can screw them into a hole and shi and i has wires that u can connect comming out of the back. i want to put green leds in my lights i wanna put like 4 in each muhahahahahhaah. but im hesitan to because i dont know how. and there should be any melting problems either right. cause it does get hot in the lights at times. i need a diagram

just drill a hole the size of the led and put them in it.

well ima use the ed holders from radio shack but how do i get them to face and reflect offa my reflectors

just drill the hole at an angle. my reflecters were in the perfect position i could just drill straight down from the top.

mine aren't pointing at my reflectors...i drilled from the BACK of my headlight...and they are pointed straight out towards the front of the headlight, and they light up the whooooole thing.

hmmm, well ima buy 2 led holders from radioshack and i will test them in school or something. see how reflective they are whats the best way to mount things like that. i mean these holders seem like a really good idea for mounting purposes. here is the link

http://www.radioshack.com/product.asp?catalog%5Fname=CTLG&product%5Fid=276-080

i mean its good for holding purposes and it makes sure that the wires dont touch close to the tip u know, so ill buy and test em and see if it works well. how do u guys reccomend wiring your LEDS together meaning so they all get power.

i have anoob question having to do with power. you how everything all ur lights draw from your battery. doesnt the voltage get split up like with a normal battery. like if u hook a light up that accept 9v if its a 9v battery and u hook another bullb up both bulbs dim dont they? w ouldnt it be the same thing with leds and what not.

if you wire 4 LEDS in a row you dont need a resistor. but if u wire 1 you need it correct. here click this link it will help convey what im asking

http://www.streetglow.com/cgi-local/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=7;t=000429

go to the second LED diagram. you have four leds each with a resistor on for each LED. now is that all one wire conecting each resisotr and LED. then u go to the next diagram beneath it. that i cant understand that u dont need a reistor. but isnt it the same thing.

these querstion are noobish, but arent they smart questions lol

I've explained this two ways here. The electrical way, and the simpler anybody can understand way using buckets and water =P

Here is the Electrical way:

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

There are 2 factors involved in what you are asking. Amperage and Voltage.

Using your 9 volt scenario, you have to look at the amperage output capabilities of the battery as well as the voltage. For example:

If you use a 9 volt battery and connect it to a single light that required 9 volts, it would light of course.

Now if you connected a second light to it in parallel (meaning the positive from the battery connected to the positive on both lights, and the negative from the battery connected to both negatives on the 2 lights), the brightness of the bulb would be identical assuming the battery could put out the proper amperage.

If you try this, and the bulbs are dimmer then if you lit a single, it means that the amperage that the battery is capable of putting out is not enough to meet the requirements of the bulbs. For example, say the max the battery can put out is 500mah, and the bulbs you are using draw 400mah. If you hooked a single bulb up to the battery, the bulb would be able to get the full 400mah required and light nice and bright. When you hook up a second light to the battery, the battery can only put out a max of 500mah, so while both lights get 9v, they each are only geting 250mah of power, making them dimmer.

Now if you were to take those lights and wire them in series (one wire goes from the positive of the battery to the positive of one light bulb. The negative of the first light goes to the positive of the second light, and the negative of the second light goes to the negative of the battery, then you would only be supplying each bulb with 4.5 volts, and therefore would not have enough power to light them at 9v and they would be dim.

In the case of the LED's, amperage is not really an issue because your car battery can put out far more then the LED's require, even if you hooked up 1000 LED's to your car battery. So with the car battery, everything is simplified as you only have to worry about volts.

The LEDs only require 4 volts to light at their maximum intensity. If you put more then 4 volts into them you will begin to overheat them and burn them out. Thus is the point of a resister. The resister drops the 12v from the battery down to 4v when it gets to the LED. If you wire 3 in series (positive from the battery goes to positive of first LED, negative of first LED goes to positive of second LED, negative of second LED goes to positive of third LED, and negative of third LED goes to negative of battery/ground, then with each LED pulling 4v in a row, it adds up to 12v, and you don't need a resister.

The Buckets of water way:

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Lets say you have a hose that allows 12 gallons of water to flow through it per minute (great.. lets mix water with electricity... *grin*). Now lets say you have a single 4 gallon bucket and you are only able to empty it once per minute. If you start to fill that 4 gallon bucket, once you get to 4 gallons, the rest and it's going to spill over (in the LED case it would overheat and toast the LED). So what do you do with the other 8 gallons? You put a nozzle on the hose that is 1/3rd the normal size of the opening. Now only a 3rd of the water can get out of the hose per minute.. or 4 gallons. This would be the resister, resisting the flow of electricity.

Now what if you have that same single hose, and 3 4gallon buckets? You can empty the buckets once per minute. You would no longer need to resist the flow of water because you can fill each bucket with 4 gallons for a total of 12 gallons, and dump them every minute.

Now in the case of wiring them in parallel, you are in essense giving each LED it's own direct feed from the battery. In the case of the buckets, while you have 3 buckets, you would have a seperate hose for each bucket, and each hose is capable of putting out 12 gallons per minute. So you are back at your original dilema, and you have to put a resister on all 3 hoses so that all 3 buckets don't overflow.

so 4 will wire up in series with no resistor? i just ordered a bunch and am wantin to wire them without resistors probably. and by series its the first lead takes the power wire then you hook that neg lead to the next pos lead and so on until you come to the last neg lead and that should be grounded?

yes that is no problem. wow thats alot to take in hmmill have to read it a few more times. me and electricity dont mix lol. so if i want to hoook up 1 led and a resitior 4 times. i have to have 4 separate wires from the battery correct?

ok im going to evetually buy green LEDS from phil, alittle later and i wanna put like mabye 3 in each headlight so i dont need to fuse the resaistors on. no i do one wire from the batt and wire them in series. so i have 2 ewires 1 to each headlight with 3 leds attched to both.

now theoretically if i wanted to make my life hard, i could put 3 leds in to the headlight and have a resitor connected to each led. but then i would havbe to have 3 separte wires from the battery going to each led in each headlight right.

ok i bought the green leds lol 20 of em

Yes dbismyname, 4 will hook up in series with no resister exactly the way you said. That would supply 3 volts to each LED (as your car battery puts out 12 volts) So your LED's will function close to their optimum performance.

Now when it comes to wiring in parallel, stating that one wire has to go to each LED was to make it easier to understand. It simply gives you an idea of why it works the way it works. When wiring in parallel, you don't actually have to run a seperate wire from the positive to each LED.

I was going to make a diagram but it's hard to make a diagram on here =/ and it's hard to explain it in text, but I'll try.

If you decide you want to wire in parallel, you can wire as many as you want in parallel as long as you have a resister in line (yes, only 1 resister is needed regardless of whether you have 5 or 50 in parallel). Here's why.

The resister serves 1 purpose. To lower the voltage. The LED's need to run on 4 volts only, not 12. You attach a wire to your + on your battery, connect it to a resister (which resists 8v from the line, only allowing 4v to go through) and then can attach as many LED's on the other end of that resister as you want in parellel. How is this possible? You simply connect the positive of each LED to the positive of the next LED, and the negative of each LED to the negative of the next LED (making sure one of the LED's is attached to a ground/negative on the battery). Each LED is still getting it's required 4 volts.

You are probably thinking "Well if you attach them like that, wouldn't you cut the amount of volts each LED gets in half.. like if you had 2 in line, wouldn't it split 4 volts between the two, making it 2 volts?". If you are still thinking about the water hose, and sharing the water between 2 buckets instead of one, then you would be correct. This is where electricity works a little different then water. The thing that plays the factor here is amperage, not voltage.

It's hard to explain it all using the water analogy because electricity doesn't act exactly like water in a hose does, but I can explain some of it.

Think of voltage as to the capacity of the water hose. Now think of amperage as to how fast it's coming out of the hose.

Water and electricity can both kill you in the same way. Volts in electricity isn't what kills you, much like how much water you touch won't kill you. Amps however will kill you, much like pressurized water can kill you.

If you take a hose and turn on the water and spray it on your hand, it won't hurt you... Now if you take that same hose and connect it to gas pressure washer that increases the spray to say 3000PSI and you spray that on your hand, it will slice right through it. Amps in electricity is like pressure. If you touch a 9v battery to your tongue and feel the tingle, you aren't feeling the volts, you are feeling the amps. The electricity is pushing it's way through your tongue at a certain speed, and the pressure of the electricity flowing through your tongue is what you are feeling.

Now if you did that same thing with a car battery which is 12v, only 3 volts more, instead of getting say 50 milli amps going through your tongue (miliamps are 1000ths of an amp), you are getting 100 amps going through your body, which would kill you. Reason being is a car battery is capable of putting out a lot more power at once. This is why you wouldn't be able to take 2 9v batteries and connect them together to start your car, or to run your stereo off of. They simply can't push out enough amperage to do anything.

I could charge you up with 10,000 volts of electricity, and you wouldn't feel it. But if you got zapped by the 110v wall outlet in your house, it will kill you. Because when I charge you with 10,000 volts, I'm only putting 50 miliamps or so through you. In essense, you are swimming into a still pool of water. You don't feel much of anything but the effect of being wet. Now when you get shocked by the wall outlet, you are getting hit with 15 amps, which would be like me taking that entire pool full of water and spraying all of it at you through a hose in 1 second. That's a lot of water to get through a hose in 1 second. The pressure required to spray a whole pool of water at you in 1 second would be enormous. It would hit you so hard it would shred you to nothing.

Now that you have a little understanding of what amps are and volts are, lets apply it to the matter at hand.

Each LED will still be getting it's 4 volts, as the battery capacity is still 12v, and the resister is still dropping it to 4v. Regardless of how many LED's you put in parallel, the battery will still be 12v, and the resister will still be resisting 8 of those volts. The LED's will draw 3mah (miliamp hours, or in other words how many miliamps per hour it drains from the battery). The batteries life is based on how many amps it has (which is a huge number.. prob somewhere around 150 amps or so).

If you put 10 resisters in parallel they will all be getting 4v and they will be drawing a combined total of 30mah which doesn't even scratch your battery.

So you probably wonder why does voltage step down when you wire the LED's in series instead of parallel. Simply because when you wire an LED in series in the circuit, it has a resistance level of whatever it's required voltage is.

If you put 12v through a wire into the first LED, it's going to suck down it's needed 4v and kick out the remaining 8v on the other side. Then your second LED is connected to it, it sucks down it's 4v needed and kicks out the remaining 4v the other side, where the last LED in the series sucks down the remaining 4v and kicks out 0v on the other side. All of it is used up.

If you wire them in parallel and didn't put a resister on it, then the power would go to the first LED, the first LED would suck up the 4v it needs and kick out the remaining 8v on the other side... but you don't have another LED attached to the negative side, so that power goes straight to ground. The second LED you have attached in parallel, isn't connected to the negative side of the LED, so it is in essense still getting a direct feed from the battery, much like the first LED. Therefor no matter how many LED's you hook up in parallel, each one is in essense getting the full blast of power, as they aren't getting the power after it's gone through an LED.

The one thing I haven't mentioned yet is the fact that resisters also have an amperage rating. This rating will be important to know if you plan on hooking a large number of LED's up to a single resister in parallel. If the resister is only rated for say 30ma, then you can't have more then 10 LED's connected to a single resister, as the resister will toast, much like a water hose would break if you push too much pressure through it.

I know this post was long, and it might be hard to grasp, but hopefully this helped some of you.

another plug for my fav site... www.howstuffworks.com

thanx guys i appreciate it all alot i finally understand it

wow, that was long think i'm starting to get it tho

Helps to look here, these are Awesome!!!


http://www.oznium.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=20&sid=9121116d5203f9c211eb466a414352cf

I used these to help me with my wiring simple & visual

& Just wanna say Thanks to PTCruzr for making them available