Low Voltage Ceiling Light For Camper

thingiverse

I'm currently working on upgrading the lighting in my trailer, as it's where I live full-time and getting ready to go off-grid. The lights will eventually be powered by a large 3.4V battery. Each light assembly consists of six COB-mounted star LEDs, putting them at around 13.86W each. They're attached using 3mm screws, which I happen to have a lot of old computer case screws lying around. Lowes sells 3mm x 5mm screws, which is what you'd need for this project. I picked up the LEDs and heatsinks for a great price - $5 USD for the LEDs and $50 for 50 pieces of heatsink. Update: August 11, 2017, 6:03 AM I added some more pictures to help explain why these lights have so many holes in them. The holes on the sides are for routing wire, as there's only a few places you'd want wires to go in my camper. I ended up printing five of these lights - one for the entryway, one for over my printer, two for the middle of the room, and one for over the foot of the bed. The first middle-of-the-room light works as a hub to send wires to the entryway light, the printer light, and the main lights. There are four holes in each dish where wire inlet/outlet holes are located, so you can tack down the wire ends. I'm using 4-conductor low-voltage (telephone/alarm) wire, with each conductor rated at 7A. The red wire powers all the LEDs, the black wire grounds the entryway light, the green wire grounds the printer light, and the yellow wire grounds the main lights. There are four circuits in one cable. I've labeled a picture of all the lights to show the wire combination for each light (RY: Red/Yellow, RB: Red/Black, RG: Red/Green). The main hub light is the most crowded as far as wiring goes, but it's worth it. I still need to design and print some sort of cable clamp to secure the wire to the ceiling - that'll be my next project. The LEDs are connected in parallel using bus wire, which is commonly used for solar panels but works perfectly for this application. It took me an hour to solder all the LEDs together, compared to two hours it took to assemble them with hold-down screws and orienting the LEDs so they wouldn't be shorted by the screws. The center hole is a singular mounting hole, allowing you to attach the lights to the ceiling. Because they're thin, I had to use six 4mm flat washers to move the housings off direct contact with the ceiling. Next on my list is to come up with a cover lens for them, as even accidental eye contact leaves you with polka-dots in your eyes. The light these give off makes you feel like you're in a spiffy new model home - I'm very happy with the results. I'll update when the lenses are done!