I'm new to the forum here, and I've seen a few posts with advice on how to wire up LEDs for a case mod. However, my situation is unusual - I have about 95 LEDs of the small yellow variety (2V I think). I'm building a sandcrawler computer case, it's mostly done, but just the other day I blew out about 20 LEDs, which made me question my wiring, and I want to re-do it in a way that will guarantee they won't burn out again. So, here's what I've done, and any advice on how to improve it would be GREATLY appreciated!!
The cockpit has 20 LEDs: 4 parallel strands of 5 lights, with the 5 lights in each strand wired in series. There are 3 other strands of lights, all wired in parallel: 20, 20, and 28. I have each of these 4 main strands running off their own separate Zalman fan speed controller, acting as a resistor, and each fan controller is running off a separate fan header on the m/b. (Can you tell yet I didn't know what I was doing when I put this together?) It was one of the 20-light sections (not the cockpit) that blew out the other day; the others were all fine.
So. Given that I have five 12V fan headers on the m/b I can plug the various strands into, what would be the best way to wire these suckers so they're as bright as possible? I've already found that running more than about 30 lights, even in parallel, noticeably dims them. 28 is pushing it brightness-wise, while 20 seems about ideal. But, I'm also using rather heavy gauge copper wire, probably too thick, and I don't know if that's maybe inhibiting electrical current.
I have a lot of photos of it, if anyone wants to get a visual of the setup, just send me a private message with your email address.