First of all, I confess that I am new to all this stuff so forgive my ignorance. My last physics/electronics class was almost 15 years ago :- D
I want to modify an LED lightpanel to use less power than it already does so that it would last longer. The LED lightpanel is being used to backlight a billboard with power supplied by 12V-20Ah battery. The lightpanel has 360 pure white LEDs (180 left - 180 right) inserted along both the left and right edges of a 1.5m x 1.0m light guide plate and uses about 30W, which is too high.
An engineer friend suggested that I could reduce this by dividing the LEDs into "multiplexed" groups and cycling through them (so that only one group is on at a time) at high frequency i.e. 75Hz - 100Hz. According to him, at this frequency (the "flicker fusion rate") the human eye can be fooled and the panel would only need a small fraction of the power to effectively light the billboard.
Is this possible? And if possible, how can it be done and what would I need to do it? How would it affect the LEDs?
Thanks!