What to plug LED's into?

[stueng]

I am looking for some 3mm LED's

I see some sites selling LED's with a molex connector

I see some sites selling just an LED and I see others selling LED's with a 3 pin connector

I dont really want one molex connector per LED... that far too many molex

what am I supposed to connect this 3 pin too? they seem like the best bet... I found one site selling a LED PCB board with 20 connectors but its £20...

 

[Tealc]

Rather depends on how many LEDs you are thinking of using and also how you are going to use them. If it's internal lighting then you should look at SMD LED strips which can be had for a few quid. If it's point lighting then 3mm or 5mm will be fine but you'll need wire and resistors to properly install these. I don't think these 12v LED assemblies you can buy are a very good idea as they just waste energy. Correctly planned and designed LED arrays are much better.

Initially I used 3 pin fan connectors connected up to Molex to fan converters such as these...

But I found that I had too many Molexes around the back of my motherboard.

So next I chopped all the ends off and left bare wires and connected them into a standard 10 Amp Terminal block.

Not the best image ever but you can see it.

What I did was remove one end of a molex extension and feed that into one side of the terminal block, then linked up some +12v and some 0v wires and left one side empty for filling with stuff. I also added a switch for on/off goodness.

Oh and regarding the 3 pin connectors, well that depends on what they are. They could be fan type connectors I suppose but could also be a different item designed to be wired onto a distribution board like you mentioned.

 

[craarc]

i have a blue led strip with i tgink a meter nearly of leds must be 200 of them and they run of a 12v molex wit a swith similar to that shown above but tbh they are always on as i like blue leds