| The Lights Of America model 2002LEDR30-65K bulb lasted about a year of intermittent use. |
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| Once something don't work, you can't bust it. So I introduced it to Mr Saw to see what I could find in it. |
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| Sawing around the joint didn't get me as far as I'd have liked, so I ended up sawing off the screw-in part of the bulb. No surprise, this is attached to the bulb innards with a couple wires. |
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| I can solve that. |
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| Once I had the wires clipped, I could see the insides of the thing. Basicly, it's a small power supply. |
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| A little zip cord, and I was ready to see if the power supply was working at all. |
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The results of this test was that the light didn't light (the problem
wasn't in getting power to the power supply.
I hooked up my ocilloscope to the power supply outputs that I could
reach and determined that the output was a half-cycle DC voltage. I'm
not sure what it was supposed to be - a half-wave is one way
to make a really cheap DC power supply. We're not talking about a computer
power supply here, we're just running some LEDs.
But, there's more to this thing that what I can see, so a gentle bit of persuasion |
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| displayed the device innards. 3 wires from the power supply attach to the circuit board. The LEDs are mounted on the circuit board in sets of 8 or 10, with traces connecting the banks of LEDs that are wired in series. |
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| Another recent death in the electronics arena was an old DSL firewall/router. | |
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This provided a 12v 1A power supply, and an adapter that would accept
the plug.
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With a little testing, I decided that I could run 5 LED's off that
wall wart before the LED's got dim.
Some scrap wire, some solder, |
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and presto -
What used to be a 60 W equivalent LED, and was then a badly-designed paperweight is now suitable for use as a night-light. My Kill-A-Watt guage says it's drawing 0.03 A If/When I stumble across a more-powerful wall-wart, I might decide to rework this for more working LEDs. In the meantime, it's an oversized night-light. |
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