Continue to Site

Welcome to our site!

Electro Tech is an online community (with over 170,000 members) who enjoy talking about and building electronic circuits, projects and gadgets. To participate you need to register. Registration is free. Click here to register now.

  • Welcome to our site! Electro Tech is an online community (with over 170,000 members) who enjoy talking about and building electronic circuits, projects and gadgets. To participate you need to register. Registration is free. Click here to register now.

Re-using LED bulbs.

Status
Not open for further replies.

DrG

Active Member
I have a set of lights with LED bulbs like this one.
Bulb 20200125_141134_HDR.jpg

One of them starting blinking intermittently. It was annoying. I switched bulbs between two sockets and the same one continued blinking.

I replaced it and there is no more blinking. But I wondered if there was anything in the bulb that might interest me. So, I took the top off.
leds 1 20200125_141610_HDR.jpg


There they are - 10 LEDs.

Then I took the bottom off and removed the high voltage guts (there are some smt chips on the back). There is nothink I want from that board - why scavenge a few cheap parts from something that was defective?
guts 20200125_201627_HDR.jpg


The LEDs interested me. Here is a close up of that board and it is metal (with a lot of heat sink compound on the other side).
LEDs 2 20200125_162024_HDR.jpg

I think you can see that the LEDs are in a serial configuration. I estimated a 3.6V drop and I really have no use for a set at that high of a voltage to use all ten in the circuit.

LEDs F 20200125_210641_HDR.jpg

I scratched through the painted surface to make some "pads" and checked each LED and they all lit. I suppose I could make use of some/all of them in a parallel fashion. It has been placed in the junk box.

One piece that I saved and probably will use is the surface of the bulb.
diffuser 20200125_204256_HDR.jpg


It may be a decent light diffuser for some photography uses.

That's it, that's all I got...but no more annoying blinking.
 
Last edited:
I think the electronics part could still be working and the blinking caused by a faulty LED. I have had a similar problem with a unit I built using seven 1 watt LEDs in series fed with a boost converter modified to give a constant current. I think that the LED warms up and thermal expansion breaks a connection inside the LED. The LED cools down again and the connection is remade and so the cycle continues.

Les.
 
I have also had LED lamps blink when the capacitors have degraded.

The ones that have a bridge rectifier directly on the input can be run with an external rectifier and smoothing capacitor. That avoids the need to open them up.
 
I've had this and I think it was one of the bond wires inside the led failing, shorting out that led made the lamp work again.
A while back when this style of lamp was just becoming popular I reconfigured one to run off 12v when I needed one, it still works, I dumped the driver board & replace dit with a simple resistor.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Latest threads

New Articles From Microcontroller Tips

Back
Top