http://www.solidapollo.com/LED-Light-Bars/

Scroll down to see the use.

J.

Wow — nice find (and fast ! :-))

I don’t know of a datasheet. As Robert demonstrated, its proper use is left as an exercise to the reader.

You should know that DealExtreme also carries this item (http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.13190) and is a little cheaper, and there’s no shipping charge. They don’t ship quickly but everything that I’ve ever received from them has been packed well (not that I’ve had any packing problems from Seeed either).

There’s no datasheet for it at DealExtreme — Seeed provides more information about it than DX does (like the 240mA reference). I’m curious about why you’d care what the reverse (maximum) voltage is — that is, unless you’re also trying to use it as a light sensor… :-).

Personally, I’d be wary of reverse-biasing them at all. Some whites aren’t designed to tolerate any significant reverse voltage — for instance, the Luxeon Rebels come to mind. However, most standard LEDs are usually good for 3-5V reverse max per device. Unclear if these are setup as 12×4 or 16×3 parallel-series chains (or something else entirely).

And there’s always our ever watching friends at the customs office.

I just got my second light bar in the mail the other day and just finished playing with it for a minute or two.

Just to see some signs of life I put 12V with a 1K resistor on it and it did light-up (which I never got to see with the first one). Knowing now that it works I re-ran my initial test with no current-limiting resistor or current-regulated supply and started going up in 0.5V from 7.0V.

It did just what I’d expect it to do, starting lighting-up through 10V just fine. Just ran enough current through it to turn it on faintly.

I sent my first one back Dec 22 and as of a week ago, they still hadn’t gotten it yet. And we thought that them sending us stuff could be slow… the other direction seems worse.