Home made LED panel

Has anyone on here made a led light panel? I was looking at some today but they were $900 I am looking for a DIY

There are many cheaper ones out there. The more expensive ones typically give you a dimmer circuit and sometimes matched LEDs so that the colors all match (something that might be hard to do buying your own). What size panel were you thinking of making?

I was thinking 18" x 18"

This will seem odd, but head on over to salt water reef aquarium forums and check out their DIY sections. They have been tinkering with light levels and designs for similar panels for years to light their tanks, and should prove a valuable source if you choose to do this yourself.

High dollar panels use color balanced Cree type or high Watt variable temperature LED's which aren't cheap and require the use of heat sinks. They also offer high quality dimmers and built in diffusers unlike cheap panels using led strips. When you realize the investment to make an 18x18 panel to be anything like a $1k panel your not going to save much making one yourself. You can look into SMD 5050 strips that can offer near 1:1 lumens per W of incandescent light. That's about the cheapest way possible but it wont give anywhere near the throw of high power LED's.

I suppose you could stick a couple of these together and work a power supply out, or use a massive amount of AA's

http://www.amazon.com …=8-1&keywords=led+hotshoe

Your local Home Depot sells 24" x 24" diffused panel for $149.

This bloke built one - (seriously - go and look at the link, then scroll down to see the pic of the beam)
http://www.candlepower​forums.com …d.php?178130-Data-Bank-70

It certainly cost him a lot of money though - 70 LEDs at about ten bucks a piece plus batteries and Aluminium
It may also be overkill

Seriously though if your using 5mm LEDs you need a lot of them to produce enough light, of your using bigger higher power LEDs they need proper heat sinking