The iDrive® Force 24: A Force to Be Reckoned With!

The iDrive® Force™ 24 is the world’s first LED driver to offer variable voltage, variable forward current and dynamic power sharing control on every channel.
Additional features of the Force 24™ include real time LED current, voltage and temperature feedback, as well as providing high efficiency LED output stages (>98%).

The iDrive® Force 24™ packs a punch with a 672W output across 24 channels in a small 19”,1U package. It was surprising to find that alternative products available today are twice the size, or offer only half the output power. The channels are bondable, allowing multiple channels to be wired together to deliver a higher amp output. The Force 24™ offers 8 bit resolution as standard but provides up to 16 bits with a further 256 step master dimming channel and is fully DMX512A and ANSI E1.20-2006 RDM compliant.

The exclusion of electrolytic capacitors on the LED output stages serves to prolong the life of the driver, avoiding one of the major reasons behind LED driver failures. In addition, the multiple channels enable faster programming of the rack-mounted drivers, which in turn reduces installation times.

At the core of the Force 24™ is the latest Texas Instruments 32-bit Digital Signal Processor with high performance integrated peripherals designed for real-time control applications. The eco-DSP™ platform enables the installer to programme each channel for LED currents from 100mA up to 1A per channel in 50mA steps and Vf voltages from 1V up to 48V.

Matt Fitzpatrick at IST enthused: “The iDrive® Force 24™ is the first LED driver to utilise our new eco-DSP™ platform so users will be able to benefit from a highly robust and energy efficient driver. The eco-DSP™ platform enables common anode connected LED fixtures to be used as well as allowing more than one channel to be bonded together to get forward currents up to 8A. It is the most the flexible LED driver platform I have seen since I joined the LED industry 10 years ago”.

Elliet Hall-Jones added, “This new technology has already helped our customers speed up large installations and because the drivers are RDM compliant the DMX addresses can be set remotely. Advanced RDM functions are helping customers monitor their LED installations in real-time, providing assurance to the lighting designers their vision remains intact”.

Geoff Archenhold, part of the engineering team that designed the eco-DSP™ engine stated, “The technology platform we have developed in the Force 24 is highly advanced and technically superior to any LED driver IC solution we have seen so far. The LED output performance is far superior as we can update the DSP according to what is connected to it. The solid-state capacitors on the output have a life up to 300,000 hours and the output ripple current is only a few per cent at most. Next year the ultraDIM option will enable dimming down to micro-amps, so LEDs can be perfectly and smoothly dimmed exactly the same way as incandescent bulbs have been in the past”.

The next highly anticipated addition to the Force 24™ family will be an incandescent light bulb dimming version, UltraDim, which is capable of removing visible DMX steps dynamically in real-time.