More Light!

In recent years the LED has seen many improvements so that we see them fitted in more and more situations where filament lamps were traditionally used. They have many advantages and their excellent reliability is often an important consideration.LED technology has come on leaps and bounds in the last few years and recently some of the higher output devices have become available commercially. Component supplier Conrad Electronics (www.int.conradcom.de) kindly donated samples for use in producing this article.Electronic engineers are not necessarily lighting specialists so this article sets out to fill in some of the technical background and also explore a couple of simple circuits to drive a 1-watt high power LED.