Quote:
Originally Posted by Worth1
I understood just about every bit of that. 
Would a simple dimmer switch/rheostat work instead of the resister as long as it had the right range I would think it would?
Sari I found 120 VAC LED lights at the store that you can change the color on, will they work?
You have me thinking now. 
Worth |
I'd say a typical dimmer switch that goes in a house generally won't work. They work by clipping part of the AC wave form essentially acting like a pulse width modulated power supply. With part off the AC cycle missing the RMS (for people that don't know what RMS is it's a type of weighted average) voltage drops. When the dimmer is actually conducting it has very little current limiting ability.
I suspect that you may know all this Worth but I've spent quite a bit of time trying to explain that LEDs and fluorescent tubes are devices that you can't change the brightness of by changing the voltage on them and that they need some kind of current limiting. Then there is trying to explain not designing using typical specs, but minimum and maximum values.