Meteor light evolution 2019.

I bought the color ones. Eight ones in parallel(?). Today I found out that they work fine on 18650's, two batteries in serie. With my power supply I found out that the current pulsed to about 450-500 mA for smooth working. I started a test with two fully charged 18650's, 3000mAh Samsungs 30Q, this afternoon. I want to find out how long the batteries will last with this jumpy current drain. I don't like this stuff on 240V in the garden at Christmas. To wet in Holland.

Hub Rijcks

Vice of knowledge! Always good to see it make an appearance. ...that and the X-Ray.

Michael Thompson

In hindsight when I spotted the similarity with the chip used in the LED star, a zener does make sense. It means the same circuit can be scaled up to run 12V clusters of LEDs.

Big Clive

I suspect that that open spot is for a Zener. The set of icicle lights I have from a few years ago had those to prevent over-voltage, but would go short-circuit and burn themselves out if an over-voltage did occur. De-solder them and poof the lights came back to life. The set that I had varied from 5 to 9 lights (it had short sections and long sections). They all took about the same time to sequence between "meteors", and the driver section was soldered to the LED sections with 4 wires, so they probably all used the same driver (hence why the sequences all took roughly the same amount of time), and then custom lengths of LEDS wired in the proper sequence.

Dustin

It's very good for "squeezing things firmly".

Big Clive

Some time ago when the vice of knowledge made an appearance I realised it was identical to the clamp on my drill press. I took it off and have used it several times as a holder/cruncher of electronic stuff. It works great for getting open glued power supplys.

Stick a little boost converter connected to the USB lead to convert them to led.

The Tinkering Shed

Thanks for the really interesting video. I learnt two different ways of getting longer LED chase effects with few pins (6-8): tri-stating and grouping LEDs and relying on speed / PWM to obscure the lower resolution pattern. Ewen

Ewen McNeill

My understanding is that Surface Mount on both sides is done with two different solder pastes, one for each side. One paste has a solder alloy that melts at a lower temperature than the other. So the first side is flowed with the higher temp solder paste , with the oven set at the higher temperature, and the second side is flowed with lower temp paste at the corresponding lower temperature.

Jeremy Impson

I've just realised that this unit may use a similar chip to a mains powered animated star effect. If it is then it just requires a current limiting resistor to power the chip, which then appears to have six open collector or open drain outputs. That might suggest that the same chip could handle much bigger effects with higher voltage and longer series strings of LEDs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9Asjh7R0wA

Big Clive