has anyone thought of making a grow light out of some 144 strips? I have a new bonsai tree that i want to make a little watering system for and i was curious if anyone has messed with the idea?
Rather wasteful for addressable LEDs. First you really only need them all at the same level. And secondly, you only need the red and blue ones. The Green is not needed by most plants.
I would suggest you just get a normal strip of red and a strip of blue and alter the drive mark/space ratios to get the perfect colour you need. Biasing the colour for foliage growth or fruit growth.
Read up on hydroponics and red/blue lights.
Yeah i also have a bunch of analog strips i can use ill read up on it thanks 
I agree with Adam, addressable LEDs would be a waste of money if you are trying to make a grow light. From first hand experience with LED grow lights, you need to have them closer to the plants than regular lights, as the lumen output vs incandescent is no where equal.
Ok I’ll throw some analogs at it once I research a bit lol
“Bonsai tree” is that what the kids call it now? 
What you want is not just “red and blue” but specific red and specific blue bands, not really present in standard RGB LEDs. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthetically_active_radiation has a bit of information but it’s not the best page for explaining. Essentially what you need is a slightly longer wavelength red (“deep red”) and what is normally called “royal blue” for the blue - targetting the spots in the wiki pages graph where the peaks are; 420-450nm and 650-680nm. A plant can grow successfully with these alone but some people add a small amount of warm white as well. You are also best using 5W+ LEDs as they are much more economical. Personally i’d go for few 10-20W LEDs rather than a larger panel of 1-5W LEDs like you see in commercial offerings. You’ll need constant current drivers and large (possibly active) heatsinks too and will probably find that it’s still more expensive than a conventional filamented or fluorescent grow light but will last substantially longer and run cooler (albeit not as cool as you might think). Sadly I don’t know a good single site resource for information on building such a light and i am a notoriously bad documenter so have no record of my past efforts but for choosing LEDs then i found this guys site very helpful - http://donklipstein.com/led.html
very interesting info thank you very much i may just let the tree stay in the sun most of the time haha
If you go to our favourite Alibaba dealer Ray Wu’s page you’ll see he has a whole section for prebuilt grow lights: http://www.aliexpress.com/store/group/LED-Grow-lights/701799_209843640.html
(People spend upwards of $1000 on grow lights?!
When they’re selling a pound of ‘Bonsai’ for 2.5x that, sure, why not?
the 50k rated lifetime of leds makes it just about worth it as otherwise you’d be replacing other types of lights at least 3-4 times for a similar overall cost. (and the power savings are decent too). It’s still pretty borderline which is best though 
I’m not really convinced by most of the ray wu ones, i don’t think anyone makes a proper mass produced properly efficient effort yet (that we as normal <10 unit consumers can access) but their prices are pretty decent compared to the cost of purchasing the parts used and with the current price-efficiency ratio then it’s not a waste, just a roughly equal alternative with a mixture of pros and cons. I think white leds only just went through the ‘more economical than anything else’ barrier in the last 3-4 years so perhaps in the next 10 we’ll see a proper game-changer in the world of grow lights. I believe it’s now cost effective for some types of vegetable in some countries but only those with little farmland compared to the population so mostly only japan and possibly singapore. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/japanese-plant-experts-produce-10000-lettuces-a-day-in-ledlit-indoor-farm-9601844.html is a good enough wee article outlining the current state-of-the-art via a description of one such place. I expect the lettuces are also not sold as normal lettuces but will be a premium organic item or similar in order for it to be profitable.
Lettuce, yes. Exactly.