LED conversion from old PAR stage lights 

If by conventional you mean something like a Variac, I never tried that. It would be interesting. If I wanted to make these dimmable I would consider adding a PWM controller directly to the light.

You can convert anything you want basically. The downside is that most halogens use dichroic color-wheels or lenses to change the color of that beam of light. Not only are those absolutely stunning to look at, it's also incredibly hard to replace it with a LED. Because you need a high power very good CRI (95+ at least) cold white LED to be able to still use the color-wheel (a bad-CRI LED like the ones from Ebay will make most colors look shitty at best). Second problem: the tight beam of light. Getting the light back to it's tight beam is hard, because where a halogen puts out serious light from a small wire in a small place, most high-power LEDs use multiple dies to output the maximum power, as one single die can't handle the current and is hard to cool down enough to make it survive. You will most likely get a bunch of dots as focussing the beam will focus the light coming from every single die on the LED. The downside is its cost: high power very high CRI LEDs are expensive (see bigclive's video on Yuji LEDs to get an idea of their price) Then there is cooling: a halogen runs fine at very, very high temperatures and even needs those high temperatures to survive. The fan's there to get the heat out of the fixture, but that's it. LEDs do not like to run hot and must be kept cool. That requires either a large heatsink or a small one with active cooling. Both situations will be rather hard in a fixture where the lightsource itself is moving. Like all of the above aint enough, you face the interface. The old one usually was meant to drive a low voltage high-current halogen bulb or a high-voltage low current halogen. Either way they have to be converted to now run the LED and make it perform the way it did as with a bulb. In short: yes, it can be done, but don't expect it to be cheap and easy. I'm now, just for the fun, converting PAR20 fixtures (those small mini-PAR cans with E27 lamp-base) to LED, as I found 3 fixtures in the trash (with a working bulb I might add) and thus were free. That's why I didn't want to cheap out on the LED and the lens. I went for an Osram 40 Watt RGBW LED (that's 10 watt for each colour) and had to accept that finding a lens that would fit INSIDE the can was hard. Either the ones I found fit but produced a very wide angle (which I wasn't after) or were bigger than the diameter of the can but did produce the spot I was after. The LED, heatsink and lens total up to something like 70 Euro (from my bare head) (that's the price for 1 fixture so far!) The LED-drivers, power supply and DMX-controls that I will not be able to fit all inside the housing of the PAR-can, still have to be added. But the first tests were stunning: the LED is expensive, the lens is the size of a small tea-cup but I have never seen a focussed multi-die multi-coloured LED blend colour so beautifull as it did. Bright amber by mixing green and red together is just bright-amber. Only at the edges you see some chromatic abbaration from the different placement of the dies, but for the rest it's just so nice to look at. I do really wonder how this experiment turned out because my experiments with a fresnel lens with such LEDs usually got all the dies show up as individual spots of light. Something you don't want in a configuration like this.

This does not have DMX control. You can add a PWM controller with no problems.

@@rudytorres6559 Hi Rudy. Id like to do this on the same lights. Can you tell me which power supply and led you used off ebay? There are also some entire kits they list with all the parts. Would those be the the best way to go? Thanks. Mike

@@mikezimmerman6064 Find a Meanwell Constant Current driver with a dimming-input and use some additional hardware for converting a DMX-signal to the appropiate signal for the dimming input (Meanwell usually takes voltage and PWM) Or try to find a Recom RCD series driver. This is a low-voltage device so you will have to use a separate power supply from mains to 'low' (36 Volt) voltage. The advantage of the Recom driver is that it uses voltage-dimming and no PWM-dimming, which usually introduces flicker one way or the other. The downside is the weird range of voltage-dimming (0,13-4,2 Volt) and the inverted way of dimming (lowest voltage: full on, highest voltage: off) This is a railway-mandatory thing as they are rated for railway-use.