LED Strip Safety

[kmay30]

Hi all,

apologies if this is not the right place to post this. I am working on a costuming project involving wearable LED strips. They won't be in direct contact with the skin, and aren't liable to get hot from being embedded in cloth or anything. But there will be quite a lot of them- maybe 12 feet of them all running off of one battery. I'm basically building a light-up box.

The plan is to hook the strips into a dimmer and a RC battery (direct current).

Are there any safety concerns I should be paying mind to here?

Thanks!

 

[trekcolencc1701]

No, LED's are low power. As long as you have the proper resistance to the battery voltage you should be fine. My only concern is the RC battery, They tend to overheat and in severe cases may explode if wired to a apparatus other than,….well…. an RC device. I would look into radio shacks battery packs. You can buy one designed to be recharged and made for an LED power supply

Hope this helps !

Let me know if you have any more questions

Cole

 

[hadokn]

This is kind of relevant to what I'm working on. I think most LED strips use 12v, is this true for your project? It's important to match the voltage, if you go too high you can burn out the LEDs. I think your dimmer might get hot, but it wouldn't likely be hot enough to burn anything,

For my project, I'm using about 200 Neopixels run off of an Arduino. These are 5 volts, but I will need almost 4 amps to run it. I have a USB battery pack for recharging phones, but I may get a RC battery pack with a UBEC to step down the voltage. Decisions!