I am projecting to control some high power LEDs ( UV, 1W, 3.2-3.4Vf, 350ma) just to let you know, this project, is to control the bright for some water tanks (aquariums) which I ve been planning so far. I am going to use addressable LEDs too, for general wavelenght, but I still need UV to react with some of my reef.
With that in mind, I ve been planning to use 5 V as source, and I was thinking about using XL4015 to control some UV LEDs in paralel, dimmed by PWM set from a microcontroler (such as ESP32 with WLED). It would work ? Does the XL4015 aswers fine to quick inputs?
The project, itself its quite simple.
The ESP sends a PWM signal, from a GPIO port, which arrives at some transistor (used as switch), such as IRLZ44N. The PWM signal, would arrive at GATE, controlling drain and source. At DRAIN I would connect the LED negative pin, and the SOURCE pin (from transistor) I would connect to GND (ssame GND from ESP32).
In that scenario, it would be created a circuit 5V → XL4015-> → LED → transistor_as_switch_drainsource → GND
Hi @Arthur252248, welcome to the forums
I’m unsure how the XL4015 (CE07271) would respond to high-current pulsing at its output. It’s definitely in the experimental zone.
It’s low-cost enough to have an experiment though, but you may find a purpose-build module gives better results. These FemtoBuck units look very promising and accept a PWM drive signal
Another option to consider would be an addressible UV strip:
This moves the control circuitry, into individual driver chips, so you wouldn’t need to worry about the losses of a resistor or possible switchmode supply weirdness.
If a microcontroller doesn’t need to be involved, you could potentially just desolder the current potentiometer on the XL4015, and wire up a panel-mount one, and just turn a knob instead of having to go to a webpage.
