This is a review of the “OMC – FFSB1 – LED MODULE, STRIP, BLUE, 32LM“. The nice folks at element14/Newark Electronics provided it for evaluation. It’s available for purchase on their site.
I’m in love with LED strip lighting, it runs on relatively low power, low temperature and very easy to install and hide. The blue strip I picked up from Element14 comes in an anti static bag without terminal connections pre-soldered. One of the really cool things you can do with these lights is cut them down to smaller peices to fit your space. Every 100mm there is a spot to chop off a piece of the tape and solder connections to your power supply.
So power, how do you get these pretty little lights to work? Since these run on 12v I was able to grab an old wall wart adapter and solder it directly to the LED tape. That’s pretty much all you need for power. If you want to get fancy you can throw a toggle switch in there or wire it straight into your ATX power supply, but as a quick and dirty setup the wall wart works great. As you can see in the gallery below the output is pretty darn bright.
Now the fun part will be picking something to sneak some LED lighting into. Maybe I’ll pimp my work bench or upgrade the lighting on my Makerbot like the folks over at Makerbot Industries did because…well because LEDs are awesome!
The only downside I found with this particular LED strip lighting is that it lacks the self adhesive backing that many LED strip lights have. This makes mounting and installation a little trickier but I suppose also allows for alternative adhesives to be used in place of the 3M peel off adhesive most strips come with.
Listed below are the specs for the LED strip:
- LED MODULE, STRIP, BLUE, 32LM
- Series:Front Firing Flexistrip
- LED Module Type:Board + LED
- LED Color:Blue
- Luminous Flux @ Test:32lm
- Power Module Configuration:Strip
- Supply Voltage:12V
- Forward Current @ Test:240mA
- RoHS Compliant: Yes
