Simple Electronics help

[Mr. Nagata]

Pretty simple for some, but complicated for me! I need to wire 6 LED's off of one battery (preferably something small and readily available, like a 9 volt). I need to wire 4 red LED's and 2 white ones. I'm looking to do this with all parts from Radio Shack. They just need to light solid, no blinking or anything like that. I'm trying to do simple head and tail lights for a model. Any help would be greatly appreciated

 

[Robiwon]

Go here and type in the info requested. It will even do a diagram of the wiring for you.
http://led.linear1.org/led.wiz
This helped when I added lights to my AMT Batmobile.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v606/directorcass/IMG_9680.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v606/directorcass/DSC00360.jpg

 

[Great_Bizarro]

To make it easy, find red & white that operate at the same voltage and connect them in a daisy chain configuration. If they are differing voltages you will need to figure the voltage for the reds and use the correct resistor and the same for the white then connect them as a unit, the red to the neg pos and the white to the neg pos.

 

[Mr. Nagata]

Thanks for the help. That calculator is great. Unfortunately, I was not able to find white and red LED's of the same voltage. Is it alright to figure out the resistor needed for two separate circuits (one of the red and one for the white), and then wire them in parallel?

 

[ShackMan]

Yes, that's exactly what you should do (easiest way anyway). As you found, you won't find red and white that have the same forward voltage drop (not standard reds anyway).

Using rough estimates, standard reds drop about 2V each. Ultra-bright reds and whites will be around 3V give or take. Using these estimates, I'd say two whites with a 150 ohm (closest value you can find to that anyway) and 4 standard reds with 50 ohms. Ultra-bright reds, break into two strands with 150 ohms (like the white).

You can get more exact values with a calculator, but these values will work for normal voltage drops on these LEDs.

Good luck,


ATM
ShackMan