I am not sure how to do the two methods and I want to clear it up. Although I do have an idea of what the diffrences are.

When wiring in leds parallel, does that mean the all the leds are connected together and there is only one wire and one resitor going to them?

And is series when you have a seprate wire and resistor for each led??

Does it matter what method you use for wiring up two leds (leds will be side by side?

ALSO, when wiring in the halo jewel led mod, can you just bend all the legs of the leds so that the are touching the legs of the leds next to them?? The you won't have to use wire to go around it and it will look much cleaner and easier to work with.

I think you're exactly right about everything. Wire them in parallel. It's better.

Use the Sickmods.net Resistor Calculator to determine the value of resistor you need.




This is what 16 LED's and a pringles lid look like. It's about the right number to be able to bend the legs and not use wire. From here, I connected a 5V wire + resistor to one of the "rings" and a ground wire to the other.

Okay, I already ordered all the stuff.

I am going to use 12 leds so the legs probably won't reach.

So is parallel better for installing any kind of led mod?

I am going to install leds behind the eject button then cut out the triangle and dash so that the eject button will glow from the inside. So I am going to use two leds for that. So Should I use parellel for that too?

Both the setups you mentioned are parallel.

parallel is when all positive legs are on the same line. And all negative legs are on the same line. You can have 1 resistor at the beginning or a resistor on each LED (on its positive leg)

series is when you have the LEDs lined up, and both positive legs and negative legs are on the same line. But then then the power gets split up accordingly and you end up with very dual LEDs.. they probably wont even light up.

Check out this tut/faq/thing

click here

For parallel connect all the positive together to form one positive. Do the same with the negative. What you do, don't let the positive touch the negative.

PARALLEL:


For series connect the positive to the negative.

SERIES:


You can put resistors anywhere. Nobody said you had to put one resistor to all the leds. You can put one resistor per led to lower the watt. Use this calculator to calculate the ohms and watts you need for your resistor: http://www.quickar.com/noqbestledcalc.htm

I recommend parallel as you would need a lot more voltage when using series.

okay, thanks.

That cleared things up for me.