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Dimming a Rigid LED light?

dmat

dmat

Well Known Member
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I installed a set of Rigid lights to replace my old halogen lights. I tested them and they are super bright (which is a great thing!) but since I do care for all other pilots on the airport, I'm wondering if there is a way to dim them for taxi?

If not, I think I could use a 3 way switch to have one light on for taxi and both on for take-off & landing.

Thanks,
D
 
You could try wiring them in series for the taxi position. This will only work if they are using simple current limiting. If the circuit is ?smart?, they might not work at all, so bench trial first.
 
Depends on what is inside the rigid light. If it has a built in constant current driver, it will likely not be dimmable.
 
They are not dimmable, they run on between I believe it's 9 and 36 volts give or take, but trying to run it below that will burn up the power supply circuit.
 
Possible solutions

Pretty much all flashlights have a PWM circuit to drive the LEDs and are not dimmable by variation of voltage. This is primarily to get long life out of the batteries.

You might be able to dim them by layering over a dimmable Buckpuck over the top, or a 555 timer chip set up in astabile mode driving a transistor power supply. It would take some tinkering to see if this would work. These parts are cheap and fun to play with.


You can Google the terms above for descriptions if you are not familiar with them.
 
Sounds like a call to their technical support is in order.
"Are these lights dimmable?"
We look forward to hearing the "official" answer!
 
Your best bet is to probably figure out a mechanical flapper of sorts to cover half the light when you want it dim.

I played with some HID headlights one time that used a system like that to provide high beams and low beams from the same projector style light. The light always stayed full brightness, but the flapper covered a portion of the light to provide the low beam.

I cant remember the light, otherwise I would show examples. :(
 
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