Collaborate Disseminate
What color are the street lights in your town? While an unfortunate few still suffer under one of the awful colors offered by vapor discharge lamps, like the pink or …read more Continue reading Fail of the Week: The Case of the Curiously Colored Streetlights
Is there anything more discouraging to the reverse engineer than to see a black blob of epoxy applied directly to a PCB? We think not, because that formless shape provides …read more Continue reading Oddball LCDs Reverse Engineered Thanks to Good Detective Work
The black blobs on cheap PCBs haunt those of us with a habit of taking things apart when they fail. There’s no part number to look up, no pinout to …read more Continue reading Epoxy Blob Excised Out Of Broken Multimeter, Replaced With A QFP
If you’re a flashlight person, you know that there’s little you would do to get the brightest, most powerful, most ridiculous flashlight possible. You might even decide to build yourself …read more Continue reading Own the Night with This Ludicrously Bright DIY Flashlight
[Big Clive] picked up some chip-on-board (COB) LEDs meant for hydroponics that were very unusual and set out to examine them on video. Despite damaging the board almost right away, he managed to do some testing on these arrays and you can see the results in the video below. He also compares it to older LED modules.
The 144 LEDs produce a lot of light. In addition to powering the device up, he also looks at the construction of the LEDs under a magnification, comparing the older style that used tiny bond wires to make connections versus the new version …read more
Planned obsolescence, as annoying as it is when you’re its victim, still has to be admired. You can’t help but stand in awe of the designer who somehow managed to optimize a product to live one day longer than its warranty period. Seriously, why is it always the next day?
The design of products that are never intended to live long enough to go obsolete must be similarly challenging, and [electronupdate] did a teardown of a cheap LED blinky toy to see what’s involved. You’ve no doubt seen these seizure-triggering silicone balls before, mostly at checkout counters and the like …read more
Continue reading Lessons in Disposable Design from a Cheap Blinky Ball
We love it when something common gets put to a new and unusual use, especially when it’s one of those, “Why didn’t I think of that?” situations. This digital clock with a suspended display is just such a thing.
The common items in this case were “filaments” from LED light bulbs, those meant to mimic the look of clear-glass incandescent light bulbs. [Andypugh] had been looking at them with interest for a while, and realized they were perfect as the segments for a large digital clock. The frame of the clock was formed from bent brass U-channel and mounted to …read more
Continue reading Old LED Light Bulbs Give Up Filaments for Spider Web Clock
Some projects end up being more objet d’art than objet d’utile, and we’re fine with that — hacks can be beautiful too. Some hacks manage both, though, like this study in silicon and gallium under glass that serves as a bright and beautiful desk lamp.
There’s no accounting for taste, of course, but we really like the way [commanderkull]’s LED filament lamp turned out, and it’s obvious that a fair amount of work went into it. Five COB filament strips were suspended from a lacy frame made of wire, which also supports the custom boost converter needed to raise …read more
Seventy cents doesn’t buy you a lot these days. Maybe some sweets or candies at most. How about a string of LEDs that you can use to decorate your home during the festive season? [Amaldev] was curious to know what was, or wasn’t, inside these blinky LED strings which made them so cheap. He’s done a Christmas LED Light Teardown and shows how blinky LED string lights can be built with the bare minimum of components.
The string he purchased had 28 LEDs – seven each in four colors, a controller box with one push button and a power cord. …read more
LED technology has improved by leaps and bounds in recent years, with what was once considered unachievable being common place now. Two of the main parameters of interest, total input power and conversion efficiency have been steadily increasing over the years. An efficacy of 120 lumens/watt is fairly common nowadays, and it may not be improbable to expect double this figure in the near future. Input power ratings have also steadily increased, with single LED units capable of 100 W or more becoming common.
But the Chinese manufacturer Yuji seems to have hit the ball out of the park by …read more
