Projector Build

Posted in Bad Ideas, Electronics, Making - September 21, 2011 - 0 Comment

I am working on a portable projector to take to an arts festival in Toronto. I was planning to power it from a 12V lead/acid battery, which would be stepped up to 110VAC by an inverter, which would then be stepped back down to 36VDC at 3A (regulated) to drive an 8000 lumen LED. Tonight, I hooked up the LED, inverter, and battery. It almost works, but the inverter is too wimpy to drive the LED. Instead what happens is there is a brilliant flash as the LED lights, the inverter output voltage drops, the LED driver resets, and then there is another flash and the cycle repeats.

Obviously, this will never do. The inverter is supposed to be good for 140 Watts, and so driving a 100 Watt LED sounds like it should be a piece of cake, but at 110V, the extra 40 watts is really only 360mA (W=VI, so I = W/V (Sort of. For non-resistive loads, there’s power factor correction)). If there’s any extra draw in the LED driver as it starts up, it could eat that right up. It’s also possible that the power rating on the inverter was simply a lie.

Switching to a 200 watt inverter didn’t fix the problem, nor did adding a 17,200uF capacitor in parallel with the battery. However, I did check the battery voltage immediately after running the system, and it was around 11.3V. That’s mighty low for a 12V SLA, so I’m going to borrow the 12V battery charger from work and try it on my batteries. It may be that I just didn’t have a sufficient charge. If that is the problem, it may mean I need to switch to a halogen spotlight, as the 12V batteries may discharge too quickly.