Archive for November, 2011

On 11/28/2011 I was honored with being the “Featured Engineer” of the day at www.EEWeb.com. You can read the full Featured Engineer interview if you want to learn a few tidbits about my history and career in engineering.

G35 LED Christmas Light Review and Teardown

In this write up & video I review the “GE Color Effects” G35 multi colored LED Christmas lights 50 count. I will cover product details, hanging hints and show a teardown and give some links to great hacks at the end.

You get to pick from 14 sequence patterns using a wireless controller.  Hacking these lights using Arduino is already very popular so I will be linking to some good hack posts below. In a later video I will be trying some of the known hacks and some of my own.

Link to the GE product page for these lights

In the box you get the below:

40.8 feet of lights
50 lights spaced at 10 inches
50 rain gutter clips, 50 base clips
Radio controller with 14 light patters

CLICK TO READ ALL —>: (more…)

Short episode showing what turned out to be a simple fix to get a 5 disk Sony CD player running like new.  One more product saved from the landfill!

Didn’t anyone ever tell you to make sure your optics were clean? Buddy boy!

In this video episode I show how to replace solder tab rechargeable batteries in some very useful consumer products that would otherwise end up in a landfill. I use more common and cheaper none solder tab reachable batteries and show how to safely and effectively solder on the tabs.

First up was the solder tab type AA 1.2v Ni-Cd in my beard trimmer. I know, not the most attractive thing a man wants to see in his bathroom.

Then my programmable Christmas tree light timer which needed a coin cell 1.2v Ni-MH with PCB mounting tabs.

I noted in the video that it was interesting they were powering the timer controller using a bridge rectified AC to DC converter.  I was surprised to see this without the use of a step down transformer before the rectifier circuit.  Further research, I found this is quite common in consumer products that require less than 70mA and it can be done safely and cost effectively.  There are some pros and cons to this approach. If you want the full details with the math and picking the correct sized passive devices  you can review this nice article at Microship.com.  For the power conditioning circuit which is closes to what is in my timer see Fig.12 in the article.

In this video I motorize my SpokePOV testing rig but first I had to fix a salvaged AC motor and weld together a box to hold and mount the motor.