Thermal management of NeoPixel Products

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saugust
 
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Thermal management of NeoPixel Products

Post by saugust »

Hi There,

I received our first 8x8 NeoPixel board today and I noticed that it gets extremely hot when run for awhile (very quickly at full white light). I was wondering if it was possible to add some heat sinking to the board so the LED's will last longer. Have you stress tested these boards at full white? How long do they last?

Thanks

EternalCore
 
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Re: Thermal management of NeoPixel Products

Post by EternalCore »

Circuit boards are designed and built for temperatures in excessive of 300-600c So I'm sure 30-60c from 64 Neopixels won't do much harm. But I can't speak for the devs, So I'll let them answer the other questions.

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saugust
 
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Re: Thermal management of NeoPixel Products

Post by saugust »

Thanks for the answer. I should clarify my question. I'm not concerned about the circuit board I'm concerned about the LED. The primary reason for LED failures is too much heat at the diode. Most commercial LED's have giant heat sinks to move the heat away from the diode to keep it cool. I would like to enclose some of these pixels in water tight enclosures but in order to do that we would need to have a heat sink to move the heat away from the diode. This likely means a custom circuit board but I wanted to ask the Adafruit team if there was any possibility for heat sinking (attaching to those giant ground pads, thermal paste on the backside of the PCB, etc.)

EternalCore
 
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Re: Thermal management of NeoPixel Products

Post by EternalCore »

According to the WS2812 RGB LED Datasheet These WS2812 RGB leds are the NeoPixels and they are designed to operate in temperatures up-to 80c and store in temperatures up-to 150c; Which I doubt that they are getting even close to those Temps. So I'm sure they are fine and will be fine for years to come.

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adafruit_support_bill
 
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Re: Thermal management of NeoPixel Products

Post by adafruit_support_bill »

Most commercial LED's have giant heat sinks to move the heat away from the diode to keep it cool
These leds typically operate at 350-1500mA. The neopixels are running at a fraction of that. The large ground-plane is also acting as a heat-sink (copper is an excellent conductor of heat). Of course, more heat-sinking is not going to hurt anything. Just be careful not to short anything out under there.

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