Growcraft How It's Made - LED Light Strips - Chilled Tech

How It's Made - ChilLED Growcraft LED Light Strip PCBs - Made in USA

Sophisticated Machinery & Careful Craftsmanship

The Growcraft light bars build the foundation for what makes our all-new lights one of the most efficient lights on the market. The process of their creation begins with printed circuit boards that come in sets of 5.

We then load the board into the tray of a stencil machine where we will apply soldering paste. Before applying the paste we will first use two cameras to perfectly line up the stencil with the circuit board.

The stencil machine will then raise up the tray and apply the paste. After the paste is applied the circuit boards are ready for their diodes.

Stencilled circuit boards are then loaded onto our pick and place machine that uses pneumatic placement heads to pull from the feeders and place LED diodes onto the board.

Each light strip gets 140 3000k and 5000k diodes and 15 660nm red diodes, for an impressive total of 295 diodes per strip.

With each pass the pneumatic makes from the feeders to the strips, a camera takes pictures of the diodes and sends them to the computer in order to make micro-adjustments to the placement of the diodes.

After all diodes are placed, two connectors are placed on the ends of each strip. In just one hour our pick and place will place 14,000 diodes on 50 PCBs.

Now that all diodes and connectors are in, the strips will then go into an oven where the diodes will bond to the strips through progressive heating. While in the oven the strips will reach up to 500 degrees F.

After spending 5 minutes in the oven the strips come out and are ready for their quality control check. We check to ensure all diodes illuminate on the board before placing them on a rack to cool.

Next, we separate the cluster into 5 strips using our de-paneling machine. We then use self-tapping screws to mount the individual strips onto our all-aluminum extrusions.

After being screwed onto the extrusions the light bars go through one last quality check.

Lastly, the extrusions are individually wrapped and boxed for our DIY kits, or sent to be assembled into our commercial fixtures.