@xrad: It goes pretty much into details to discuss this topics and I would be very interested to discuss this with you. Thx for the response first!
Many roads get you to Rome!
When I started to deal with the project of controlling the LED the solutions to drive i.e. up to 500 mA to a single LED, the ON Semiconductor device was very attractive! I assume you and me we both know how the intensity of a LED is controlled by PWM. What made the ON Semiconductor device attractive was its ability to drive 10 50 mA. Using a couple of those to reach the 500 or 600 mA for each LED gave me 256 levels of current flow per LED, means on each of this 10 channels. As I am sure you can appreciate, a high performance LED that is fed with 500 mA does generate a lot of heat! So the challenge related to it was to build a lightning device with such an LED in the environment of the deck of a sailboat model. That is why I had to go to boards with aluminium core.
Still so you can safely assume that not every LED in one of the 24 locations does not diffuse the heat similar to the values of heat dissipation of the other LED! Also the heat dissipation capabilities of each lightning device receptacle can also change over time. So the danger for the LED in my environment is to be fed with too much current when dimming to the strongest possible value. So the feedback from the heat sensor directly below each LED will detect when the temperature grows above a threshold I define. The I can individually and dynamically limit the increase of the current fed to the LED so that it does not get hotter then a heat threshold I define.
The second part of your response regarding the sail control system:
To implement a sheet control system that looks like the original in the foto in my case requires to be able to change the length of a sheet of 8.3 meters! This demands a mechanism that controls the length of the sheet in accordance to the angle by which the sail opens in relationship to the enter axis of the boom of the sail. If the sheet gets too loose on the deck it will get stacked to object on the deck and it will get nodes that prevent its control.
So in my system I do use a stepper motor and angular magnetic sensors with 14 bits of resolution. One sensor monitors the angle of the boom and in a table it has associated with each angle a sheet length! So the stepper motor will only provide sheet length required for a specific boom angle! As the the stepper motor has the ability to turn 21 times to get the up to 8.3 meters sheet length I do have more than 52k positions of the stepper motor
I hope my effort to respond respectful and informative to your response!
Here the link to my report of building from scratch the sailboat Carina in this forum!