troep

@Madkad: Yes But if your illuminator runs on 12 volt's. You can just put a 13.8 (or more) volt powersupply and a 7812 voltage regulator on your illuminator. Just find out how many amps your illuminator uses. So you put for example 14 volt's through the cable and the voltage regulator gives of a nice 12 volts to your illuminator. The 7812 package has different current value's 1 to 3 amps is easy to get. Doesn't cost you a fortune. Here in Holland the 3 amps model costs me 2 euro's and then use some capacitators to get a nice stable output. Let's say 2,50 euro's and you're the man

@Rayled: Really always on? Don't you drive your powerleds using pulses? So you can drive more current through the leds? + powersaving because not all the leds are on at the same time (Well for your eyes they are offcourse and the camera). I got building into IR illumination with my work and my current simple ir illuminator just get's pretty far. I got it now to 25 meter (see pics). And with some trics with a plastic layer I get a nice spread. All with just conventional 5mm led's. A pain in the *** to solder them all. But my work just haven't got 880nm or 940nm IR 5 watt led's in stock (every other RGB color we do have in stock for street lightingfixtures and 10 watt+). But pulsing led's will give some more light* or let us say mW's. But I always build pulsed led matrix circuits for power savings. The more led's you have the more current and watts you'll need. Some extra elektronics can save you current and the camera won't notice it. When using powerleds (1 watt or more) you really wan't to pulse these if you are using a lot of them in your array. So to save energy Then again you don't have to tell me how you are building your illuminators, because that's a company secret I presume. *= The more light you get depends on the speed that you led diode needs to get to the specified mW's This post is starting to get technical. And we just wanted to know if those cheap Ebay illuminators where any good. With a simple modification you can really get a nice spread.

Wire distance can cause powerdrop. Because of the internal resistance of the cable. A small trick that some guys do (I did it also). When you know how many volts you are losing, just but a slightly bigger power supply on the other end. But only do that if you know what you are doing (like me). But then the less cable you use, the better. You can overdrive your leds by a little of 1 volt without any real harm. But that depends on how the unit was build. When I build these units I keep in mind that dat leds have minimum and maximum values of volts and amps. Amps are something you can't fiddle about. But when a led has a minimum value of 1.2 volt and maximum of 1.8 you can fiddle a bit with the power you put in. But also only when you know what you're doing or you end up with 200+ normal diodes.

I just this nice forum from a friend. I'm a lighting engineer from Holland, and I design and build all kind of lighting solutions. Mostly now i'm busy with standard streetlighting based on LED technology. CCTV is also a section that needs lighting. And that's mostly infrared. My knowledge with IR is something that can be usefull here. My CCTV knowledge is not that best, but hopefully we can learn from each other.

Put some IR leds arround your license plate. In the dark you will see a white spot on the picture. But in time technology will catch you anyway. Because the simply use higher lightning spectrums for illumination. In bright daylight you just have to keep it to the speedlimits.

Some time ago that this topic was made but I do have some extra info that can be usefull. First of i'm an engineer that makes all sorts of lights and elektronics for companies. I Also made IR illuminators and circuits for controlling them. All the Ebay and cheap illuminators use just steady DC input voltages. It means that the leds are on all the time. Just take A datasheet from let's say an LD274 that's an infrared led 940nm. If you are using this led for normal steady DC operation you can feed this led 20ma of power. If you pulse this led you can feed this led 1A over a time frame of 100 microseconds. This also means that the led is giving out more light (in MW because lux is not for invisible light). The Rayled is one of the models that is likely to be pulsed. De leds are setup in a matrix and for example every 100microseconds a set of leds are lighting up. Having 10 sets of these leds and when they are switching on and of they appear to be all on. But I can't be sure if this is the case. I can say a lot more about this of someone can open up his raymax and take some photo's of the PCB and so on. If someone can do that they can email me the photo's to troep[AT]isbelangrijk.nl I can then post back more info on this forum. So we can all benefit from the info if it's better to get a pulsed illuminator then an non pulsed steady DC ulliminator. Also you have to look at the angle that the leds are sending out. Using 100 degrees pulsed leds give you more IR light than 30 degree pulsed.