I have been looking at adding an LED light to the top of my rack and it seems dumb to add a giant AC-DC transformer and second plug to the wall just for the light when I have a DC 12v rail here in the eurorack power supply.
Is this a bad idea? How to make this happen?
I figure all it would need is a power header with a line to the switch and back to ground but I am new to this game and not sure what I am missing.
Series circuit
simulate this circuit – Schematic created using CircuitLab
Figure 1. Five LEDs in series.
LEDs aren't linear (current is not proportional to voltage as in a resistor) and small increases in voltage can cause a large increase in current to the point of destruction. A series resistor will limit the current to a safe value provided voltage doesn't deviate too much.
Since you require 2 V per LED at 10 mA that means we need to drop another 2 V in the series resistor. From Ohm's Law, \$ V = IR \$, we can calculate \$ R = \frac {V}{I} = \frac {2}{0.01} = 200~\Omega \$. 220 Ω is the next highest standard value.
Parallel connection
simulate this circuit
Figure 2. Parallel circuit.
This time each LED requires its own resistor which needs to drop 10 V across it. Using Ohm's Law again we get \$ R = \frac {V}{I} = \frac {10}{0.01} = 1000~\Omega = 1~k\Omega \$.
Use a 220 ohm resistor, assuming you connect the LEDs in series. If they are parallel, use a 1.2Kohm for each. There are several good websites you can use to calculate this, here is the first Yahoo! link: ledcalc.com