How to Wire Multiple LEDs: Series vs. Parallel LED Circuits

hey everyone and welcome to this live workshop on wiring LEDs we are not just going to wire One LED because unlike a lot of things in life less is not always more and that especially is true with LEDs more is always more we're going to be exploring how to wire them in series how to wire them in parallel and how to pick the best LED design that is going to make your project shine how do you like that Illuminating shine I know a lot of these wiring LED videos use breadboards if you've never worked with a breadboard it can be a little confusing to see how the circuit works so we are just going to be tying some wire together and hope for the best if you're getting started with LEDs I always recommend getting an assortment pack LEDs come in a whole bunch of different colors but these are by far the most popular you're going to get your Reds the yellows the blues the greens and the whites this kit has has the 5 mm ones which is your standard every hobbyist knows our 5 mm LED and that's just the diameter of the casing you can compare this to a little 3mm LED and you can see how tiny that is so obviously this one appears much more brighter than this guy they also have 10 mm 8 mm but you have to be careful with those because you just assume that they're going to be brighter but not always because often times it is just a 5 mm with a bigger casing around it you have your diffused ones which are the colored ones and then you have clear ones and clear ones can also be a variety of different colors you don't know what color it is until you light it up but this one's white so I know this color each color interestingly has its own range of operating voltage this is the voltage range that it needs to even light up so if you give it something less than this it won't even light up if you give it more well it's going to burn out then you're going for a smoke effect which is like a totally different Workshop before working with any LEDs and circuits always test your LED because even when you get a kit like this trust me there's always a dud or more in there so you want to make sure you don't go through all this wiring and you forgot to check that it works and it's a done and you got to cut your wiring so it's always very safe to test these things on a 3vt coin battery without a resistor and unlike a lot of components the p ity doesn't mess up your LED meaning say you mess up and you accidentally hook it up backwards it's like oh did you blow it up in my case yeah I typically blows stuff up but no LEDs are pretty resistant so they don't blow up and you can see it's gone right back to working and they're always best visible from the top these diffuse cases help diffuse the light to the side but if you buy the clear type they are much more bright at the top than they are on the side there the positive and the negative kind of look the same like how how do you know which one's positive and negative so I have like a close one and I'll tell you my chief way of knowing is you can see the legs one is longer than the other so the positive is always the long leg and it's called the anode and the cathode is the short leg and that's always your negative now the other secret way you can tell and don't feel bad if you can't tell because I can't tell you have a rim that goes around the epoxy casing on the negative side the rim stops there's a flat spot on it sometimes you can feel it I don't see no flat spot so if you don't see a flat spot don't worry about it in a series connection the power flows from positive to negative through each LED so the LEDs are basically aligned in a row and the power just kind of travels through them that way with the voltage you have to add up the forward voltage that's the voltage that you know you need for your power supply and because they're all sharing this power supply the same current is going to flow through all LEDs and your average LED consumes 20 milliamps of current so 02 amps the voltage is different for each color so we have that information on the lid of my box and for resistors you only need one resistor so it's really simple it's less components that's why a lot of people like series connections but as we shall see it also has its disadvantages typically you're going to see circuits the way it appears on your left with the circuit on the anode side the positive side of the LEDs on the right I've also seen circuits hooked up this way and this is equally correct you know some people put the resistor on the positive side some put it on the negative side it does not matter how do we know what value resistor that we need for a LED circuit the traditional ohms law you can see pictured up top V equals IR but you can rearrange this equation to calculate for different things that second equation is the one that we are particularly interested in and the one that we're going to be using we want to hook up four red LEDs and this totally explains why my red cubby hole is totally empty because I'm using them all for these diagrams that's a total of 8 volts so the 9vt battery will definitely do and because they are all on the same path each LED consumes two amps so long as your power supply can provide eight volts and 02 amps all four of these LEDs are going to light up there's an extra volt to contend with nine volt power supply we're only consuming eight there's just kind of one extra volt here floating around so we need to consume it somehow we're going to take our ohms Law formula where we take the difference of the power source which is generally more than what our LEDs need so 9 - 8 is 1 and then you divide that by 02 that resistor has to be 50 ohs M and it'll cover all those LEDs very rarely the resistor that you calculate is going to be just available off the shelf so in those cases you can either take smaller resistors and combine them in series to make the exact amount which I don't recommend or just bump up to the next common value and I always prefer to bump up because then you're kind of playing it safe the power will come in from the battery it's going to hit this 68 ohm resistor because that's kind of like the natural One Step Up from the 50 Ohm resistor the higher you go with the resistance the dimmer these will glow so I try and stick as close but a little over as possible it goes into through the positive leg of the first one goes lights the LED comes back down goes through the negative leg then goes to the because it always flows from positive to negative positive leg of next one up and over light that sucker right there and then when he comes back out this goes goes to the negative of the battery so I kind of colorcoded the wires you know just to to help us out here and let's see how this thing lights up so all I'm going to do is hold these connections with my bare hands all right and we're getting a nice even glow no funkiness right so we calculated the correct resistor value cuz everything seems to be on you know and not frying out now pros and cons of series the nice thing about series is that it requires very little current the big drawback to series there's two of them the fact that you're adding the voltage so we have nice four LEDs here we can power it with a 9vt battery that's great but what if you want to do like 20 LEDs or something like that well now that's 2 * 20 that's 40 volts so your volt requirements start to really escalate you know unless you start to separate out your LED circuit into multiple circuits and kind of power them separately the other big disadvantage is because the LEDs are all on the same path if this one blows out the whole circuit stops working if you pick the correct resistor LEDs last a very long time so they're pretty secure circuits so I don't want to make you think that oh I should always stay away from series because the whole thing could go down they're very very reliable if you got your resistor situation figured out you know along with your power supply with a parallel circuit each LED has its own path directly to the power source so if it's Buddy decides like it's going to take Friday off well the rest of the LEDs can continue working just like you had to add up the voltages for a series well here it's opposite you have to add up all of the currents well the good news about LEDs is that they draw very little current so 02 per LED you can add more LEDs well now you're going to have to have one resistor per LED because that led has a direct path to the power source so it's going to need its own resistor it's wired up a little bit differently and again I gave you an example where the resistors are connected to the positive side and the resistors are connected to the negative side and the first thing you're going to notice here is the battery size so we went from a 9vt now to two8 batteries and that's because we're not adding up all that voltage anymore instead we are adding up the current how does one calculate the little resistors on these LEDs right here it's much like we already did so you know you need a total of two volts because each LED is independently tapping into that power source and taking their little two volts so as long as it provides two volts that's great we got three volts so we went a little bit over but here we have to add up the current so 0.2 multiplied by 4 is 08 so the only reason we add up all the current is that you want to make sure that your power supply can supply that current so say we had like hundreds of LEDs added or you know many many more LEDs something that's beyond the two aa's then you know you're going to need a beefier power supply how do you calculate the resistance well it's the same thing you take the power source which is three you minus out the voltage that's going to be consumed which is your two volts and you're left with one volt well we got to do something with that extra Vault so you divide it by 02 now why 02 and not 08 because that's like the total of what you need because each LED is individually connected to the power source so you almost treat each LED as if a individual like you're you're wiring up four single LED circuits is kind of the way you think about it so always remember to calculate that current for the One LED and so that's we come back up again with that 50 oh ohms and since we don't have a 50 ohms right out of the box we'll choose the 68 ohms these are two wired in parallel and this is just kind of another example of how to do it before we get to my rats nest and you can see definitely where the anodes are because I have resistors next to the anodes and rather than putting wires on the resistors I just Twisted the resistors together because I on purpose needed these eyes to be real close together like spider eyes I just left the installation off here so you guys can see how then this is wound to the positive wire I wonder if these glow green and that's why I use a green wire we'll soon find out and you can see the two negatives bound together and then going to a Master wire each positive of the LEDs is tapping into a master positive wire let's say and same thing for the negative now how long the master wire is how long each little tap is is really up to your design I like to keep the forks really close to the LED so that way in your prop you're only sending two Master lines down to the battery wherever you have your battery hidden if you try and connect each LED say you have eight of them now you're going to have eight positive wires eight you know it just helps the conserve wires so I try and make the connection as close as possible after positioning this you know and getting this kind of measured out in position going to use a coin battery here just to kind of quickly see what the heck is going on positive and negative oh and these are flickering red LEDs here you can get them solid like we have you can get them flickering you can get them flashing you can even get them multicolor but you know we all get started with the standard five colors here is the thing that looks not at all like the picture but it's really no different than what I got going on right here if we just kind kind of pull this apart a little bit you can see the positives coming from the anodes of the LEDs and I kind of wired these all close together just so they kind of appear on the same uh screen there and I'll just hold it like this so you see all the positives and as quickly as possible I like to just join them all so that way you have a master trunk and same thing with the negatives I just joined them all into the master trunk now if you need these to be real close together like say you have a scanner effect going on you may just be able to tie these via the resistors exactly as I did here and just bag these intermediary wires and perhaps even bag these if these need to be so close together sometimes you can tie all the negative leads together this is going to look wildly different depending on what your design is so let's see if we can light this thing like we did the other one and the trick here is because it doesn't have any of its insulation is not to allow the positives and negatives to touch that are non-insulated so something like this might work so I'm going to use two aa's it's nice steady all of them are evenly lit up if one of them just falters the rest of them will continue to light up big advantage of the parallel is that we were able to do this with two ablea batteries versus the 9vt to power the same amount in series say your LED installation gets to be so big and you need one amp three amps you know something like that well you can always switch to a wall wart I love the dial you can set it to 6 volts 4 volts however your LEDs need if you have it series parallel but this is also a 3 amp if my eyes don't deceive me this is a 3 amp so you can connect a decent amount of LEDs to something like this using the proper resistor and then plug it into your Lighting Display and I always like to use a female adapter like this because then you can just connect your positives and negatives to the female adapter and plug it in and then you have something that lasts a little bit longer what if one of these got busted and I am just going to pull this guy out of his circuit will the circuit work yep so your three will continue powering on and making your prop awesome while that guy takes a nap the best way to hook up a multicolor situation is in some kind of parallel situation because you can account for the voltages and each LED has its own resistor if you're trying to hook all of these up in series well that blue it needs more volts it needs like 3.3 volts and green I don't know why I have 2.5 volts that thing needs at least 3 volts but I think I was trying to get a nice range of numbers the the blue LED is going to require so much more than say the red and so the red could run the danger of getting burned out so it's best to do multiple colors in a parallel wiring so let's see if we poof anything I'm going to connect with the battery positive to positive negative to negative and we got everything lighting up let's say we were to light it up with the 3v all the LEDs look much much dimmer because that blue is basically like I I need you know I need more more juice we talked about series we've talked about parallel but it turns out you can combo them and this gives you even more power you know so say you want to do like a whole bunch of blue ones a whole bunch of yellow ones and maybe some red ones so here's another idea that you can explore and these are the series parallel circuits each row is hooked up in series each row has its resistor you can either put it on the positive or the negative how does one calculate a resistor for this situation now for each branch we're going to require eight volts but because they are wired in series they're only going to consume 0.2 amps and same thing with the other Branch so in terms of power because each 8vt branch is taking power independently from the power source Direct ly from the power source a 9vt is going to be enough to power each 8vt branch and now it also needs to be able to deliver a total of 04 amps that's not a problem for the 9vt so we're going to put that 04 aside and look at the equation for getting that little resistor and you'll notice it's exactly like calculating a resistor for a series circuit so it's the 9 minus 8 because it's going to require eight for all four and that's going to give you that 50 ohm resistor again you can also use this for your multicolor so long as no Branch exceeds 9 volts you're good to go keep adding LEDs for the red LEDs you can add up to four if you're going to use a 9volt battery for the blue LEDs two is the best I've gotten away with three like just saying two is like the textbook you know amount and then same thing with the greens probably two is better but sometimes you can get away with three and calculating the resistors is exactly like calculating them in series so let's see if we can hook up like kind of a colorful series parallel circuit so we have a red here in series and I got four of them just like the the design if we're going to use a 9vt battery 2 468 it should be able to power this oh I'm going go for it three let's go for it see what happens and three of these what we're going to do is now connect all all the negatives together and they each have their own way of getting to the power source and let's do the same here let's connect all these are positives all the positives all the negatives like all the Good Vibes are over here all the bad vibes are over here so let's see what this mess looks like I'm going to use alligator clips for this so I'm going to kind of just get these guys here like that and I'm going to connect this side over here with this alligator clip we're going to just make sure that each branch is kind of their own thing and not touching like metal on metal touching I have a 9V and I'm going to clip the negative on this negative terminal and off camera I'm going to clip the positive one so I don't move oh just like I just did move the circuit around like that so let me just do one more adjust this is me trying to not use the breadboard all right so I think nothing's touching I'm going to go ahead and clamp the red and we can see oh it worked and they look decently bright we know how to wire one led to a battery two LEDs three LEDs and now we can do them in series in parallel and freakishly combine them to series parallel type circuits oh yeah so we can make some freaky circuits I'd love to see what you're working on if you came up with a really cool LED design design I would love to see it and heck I love seeing the spaghetti wiring behind the scenes that goes into it and as you guys know this is shot live for community members so if you haven't joined up I encourage you to join the engineering artist Community Link for that is below and inevitably we get to chatting because it's live and it's fun and I forget to mention something or I call a red LED a blue LED all of those m stakes and cool things that I think of where I'm like I cannot believe that I did not cover that that's all going to be in the tutorial in the link below along with every diagram that you've seen so you can follow along the prettier wiring then which you saw here all right guys I had an amazing night so go out make your project shine and I will catch you the next time bye

Channel: Rachel De Barros

Views: 48,193

Keywords:

Id: KMFYCu2otrk

Length: 21min 24sec (1284 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 12 2024