Finally got my PC wired up today to the point that I could do testing with the RGBA LedEngin that I got. Pack of 14500's fully charged, TCSS style heavy blade with the diffuser and a few ft. of giftwrap for the power source and blade through a new PC 2.0. I wired the LED R+B parallel and G+A series for FOC (have not tested the FOC yet, thats just how its wired on the star currently). Granted its in pieces on a table rather than being held in the hand, but it didn't seem to be as bright as I would have expected. Didn't seem to be any brighter than a DX RGB running off of 4AAA and an econo board, and less bright than Red or Green P4's off that same econo board setup (thats all I've got to compare it to in person). Made me wonder if I'm overlooking or doing something wrong, or if I just had unreasonable expectations to begin with.
I tried a few different things just messing around, and of course all I had were a bunch of 1W resistors leftover from testing for purple with the DX RGB earlier, so likely not the needed material on hand. Regardless, with the R+B parallel, I initially threw a 1W 1ohm resistor on Blue and maybe a 1W 2.5ohm on red (mainly just to have it resistored out of being frightened at powering up my first PC for the first time). PC was set at 1500ma. After that, tried the same with the PC at 2000ma, next was no resistor on Blue and the 2.5 on Red, then the 1.0 on Red, then no resistor on either in parallel. After that, I switched over to just using the G+A in series off the PC at 1000ma and then 1400ma (for a nasty looking puke/snot color, though I was just testing for brightness at this point). Still not very impressive on the brightness really.
I'm probably going to ditch the TCSS diffuser and just go with the giftwrap in the future, but I know what that setup looks like with the little 3W RGB and today's experiment didn't exactly blow me away. Still, this was just the first day of messing with it, and I'll jack around with it some more later on. If I don't like it in the end, I'll just pick up a P4 or a Rebel. Not too big of a deal. The fun is in putting it all together anyway. The sound is awesome though. Likely will be less loud once its all together with the pommel in place and the battery consuming space (battery will be rearward of the speaker due to space issues from only having a 2" double female and a gear section as the only standard inside diameter size parts to work with, battery pack is in the pommel mainly). But as is with the 2w speaker, it is very nice sounding. Had to stop for the night since everyone was trying to sleep.
Also, definitely color separation on power up/power down in parallel, though not a concern for me.
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