I am building an ESP32 wled project which has to be battery powered. The led strip is a SK6812 5m 30led/m which totals 150 RGBW leds. I used a 4x18650 power bank to power it up which worked for a while but soon I burnt it as too many amperes passed through it!
What options do I have to power up this system with 18650?
Is there a bank that gives more than 2A?
I am also considering reducing the total number of leds. Using a 4x18650 case and a 3.7v->5v step up module seems to be more work to do but I am not sure which step up module would support all this amperes.
If you have any suggestions on which step up module to choose or any other setup it would be really helpful.
thanks!
One must know the difference between series wiring and parallel wiring.
The reality is that the 18650 battery would be a very good battery to use if wired in parallel. You could put two or 50 together in parallel and all you get is longer span of the battery.
If you put two in series, you’re going to burn up the LED strip since it doesn’t really want more than 5V and you’d be feeding it 7.4v with only two batteries in series.
You “might” be OK with a 6V powerwheels type battery. They’re also used in security lighting.
Otherwise, a bunch of NiCad or other 1.2v in bunches of 4 would get you to 4.8v. Grab an 18V Ryobi battery and reverse engineer it to send out 4.5 v. If you know electronics then you’d even be able to keep it in the original form factor and add a simple switch to recharge it.
Honestly, there’s hundreds of options for portable power.
Once you get over 5.5V (and that’s already high) you’re well past the safe operating range of addressable LEDs so even a 6V lead acid/Gel battery will destroy stuff. You probably want higher voltages (multiple 18650’s, 18V tool batteries, etc) in conjunction with a 24V->5V buck converter. The converter will take anything from 7V to 24V and safely drop it back down to the 5V you need for the LEDs. You pick one with a current rating that matches the maximum draw of your setup. Going higher voltage will keep the wiring smaller as the wires don’t need to handle as much current until you drop down to 5V.
Thank you very much for your suggestions!
In my case I wanted a small portable and easy to transfer set up for a music installation for a 2-3 hours performance per day. Hence I ended up choosing the power bank set up:
Due to the fact that people nowadays want to have rapid/fast/extra turbo charging speeds for their mobile phones, there are a lot of options of power banks with 22.5W rating. Since power banks are 18650 in parallel wiring with a step up/charging module I can light up all 150 leds at around 2.5A for 3-4 hours (10000mAhs) which is ok for me. If I want to increase time I might have to decrease brightness a bit more.