Let's take a look at another eBay Special Solar Inductive Wall light. This one was interesting because it came in three options. You could have the Cent glow red or change color or do the simulated flame effect and it looks quite nice in the pictures. H You can judge for yourself.

it looks like in real life. So uh, once again, lovely image here and it says six 6,000 watt LED Solar Wall lights P Motion sensor outdoor Garden Street Fence light and it was 5 plus5 shipping so 110 all in shipped. Uh, people will jump to the defense of the company and say that 6,000 watts is actually the model number, but it's not really. I'm not sure the model number.

there's the model number there. it is not 6,000 Watts Anyway, let us explore what we get. The box is multi-sided It has the color changing version picture here. Um yeah, I think that's more or less it I'm not sure what the red one does I can imagine the color changing world, just go red, green, blue and all that.

but not sure what the red one does. It comes remote control with the magical SOS button. I'm not sure what that does yet because I've never found anything actually responds. So here's a light.

It has the outer ring of white LEDs and if I click the button, watch your eyes. It's going to be bright. It lights up and it then just detected. The Dusk Well, the lights so it tamed down right? Okay, so uh, don't watch your eyes.

It's too bright for it to actually operate. Um, that it's got the three modes. It's got infrared sensor, it's got the pass infrared detector, and uh, the solar pan on the back has 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 sections, which is about 5.5 volts going on. roughly half a volt per section of solar cell and it's quite small.

I'd say it's going to be about 50 milliamps. So what I'm going to do now is um, I'm going to uh, set this up so it goes into its little flame emulation mode for that. I'm going to have to cover the pass infrared detector. so I'll do that right now one moment, please, right? Okay, not going to lie.

I was expecting something a little bit more than this. Let's take the cover off because this just banic caps off the outside and let's see what the LEDs are doing inside. So we literally have a two channel flame with the LEDs just uh. on the outside, they're just dimming up and down the middle side.

they're just flashing. That is it. And if I take the cover off that I've put over the Pr, watch yourself. It's going to get bright.

Suddenly it will detect my movement. That's what we've got under the cover. Okay, back to the main video. Watch your eyes.

even more light is coming back. So now we've seen the disappointing reality of the flame effect. Uh, here is remote control. If I turn it on.

it's got the usual modes. It's got the sort of H it. It's got the one that it stays off until uh, it detects movement I think that's the one that goes to the flame effect. The other mode is uh, it goes at low level, but brightens up when it detects movement.

Yes, it does. and the other mode is possibly just staying lit all night. I'm not really. sure.

Um, not really tested it. Not actually going to test it either. But anyway, let's also get the SOS button which I'll hold it in for ages. No.

I Thought it might strobe or something and do something exciting, but no, it doesn't right? Tell you what, let's open it up. So as you've already seen, the front just ban it, caps off and reveals a circuit board with three connections coming on. One is the common positive I think and the other one's switching to negative, including the one with the little microcontroller in here that looks as though it's driving the LEDs directly. Um, let's take the back off it.

Uh, is this screwdriver going to fit? Yes, this screwdriver is going to fit. There are six screws. This is giving strong Dja Vu strictly because of this ball mounting bracket. Because a Solar Lter took apart with an equally ambitious power rating, it also had that exact same mounting system.

They may be from the same Factory Maybe all they make is optimistically rated. Sor Lights Do I need to lift? Oh no, that come that comes off together. so it's got 18650 Again, that's nice. Is this the same circuit as before? I'm not really sure.

There is what looks like a microcontroller and some transistors for switching the two circuits. possibly little voltage regulator or is that oh that might be I'm I'm getting deu. This is more or less the same circuit board that was in the other unit. Okay, I Shall does that pop out? Is it stuck in? it is stuck in? It's not going to pop out.

Uh, but I shall explore this. There are are two screws. That's why it's not popping out. but really, it's just the circuit board with the two circuits in it.

Okay, one moment please. I'll take a picture of the circuit board and we'll compare it to the previous one and see what it looks like. One moment please. Reverse engineering is complete and some science has been done, so let's explore.

The LED panel has the outer section of the cold white LEDs and they're all just in parl. There is no current limiting. It's a bit odd. There is a 1 ohm resist series with the uh color effect section.

Now the color effect section has a little eight pin microcontroller. Let's Zoom down a little bit. It's a little eight pin microcontroller and uh interestingly pin. The pin out is identical to like the P 12 uh sort of pin out but also P pin 4 is not connected.

This is interesting cuz pin 4 is the master clear and the P microcontrollers. Now there are effectively five circles of LEDs here and I wondered what would happen if I populated the other ones. so I did. Let me just turn this on and bring it in.

So I populated it and if we Zoom down a bit in this I put green ones in in the other positions and what happens is that the three outer ones undulate. they dip out one at a time whereas the two inner ones do that sort of. General flashing patter. I'm guessing the inner ones are for flashing effects and the outer three.

if they were populated with red, green, and blue, they might be the color chasing one for the other effect. that's just red apparently. Uh, I'll just turn that off for the other effect if it is just static red. I'm not sure why they'd want that.

If you were to bridge pin 78 with this microcontroller with a blob of solder and these two adjacent pads, then uh, that would bring in one, two, or three sections of these circles so you could just populate it with LEDs and in the controller, you could just just have a resistor chosen to match. Talking about the controller, let's bring the controller in and take a look at it. Let's zoom out just a little bit because it is fairly wide. There we go.

So starting at the very beginning, the solar panel connects to the orange pad here and it connects to Blue. Here it h can charge the Lithium cell which connect to the red pads via this Npn transistor via an odd circuit is under control of the microcontroller. The microcontroller also switches power to the infrared sensor and the pass infrared and the only little decoupling capacitor is purely across the pass infrared Uh, and IR sensor. probably because they're the most sensitive they require the most stable Supply Although it's not a regulated Supply It's literally just being turned on by the microcontroller when it's uh activated.

There is a switch under here, by the way um, and that's presumably to save parents standby. The output is Switched via a Npn transistor for the flame effect and a mosfet for the white white, but there is no current limiting. I Thought the 1 ohm resistor would have been for the White and the other one would just been switching, but it's they've not used that. You can add a resistor yourself if needs to be, but they all have a they have used very standard resistor values.

They've used Uh, 1 ohm, they've used 100 ohm Um, 1K and 100 100K. Let me show you the schematic oh incident. The Lithium cell, which they've just soldered directly onto the end of, has a sizzling capacity of 7 100 milliamp per. It's not really that great, but you know it's good enough.

Less of a bang when it inevitably fails because uh. One of the downsides of these Uh solar garden lights of the Lithium cells is that they will try and charge the cell below zero. So if if it's winter and it's a sunny winter day and the temperature is below zero, Lithium cells do not like that because as the lithium ions transfer across from one electrode material to the other, the there's a problem that they can't intercalate. they can't merge in properly, and they form a layer of lithium and it damages the cell.

So here's the Uh solar panel. It's not a very generous solar panel 5.5 volt typically underload and that goes up to that transistor 100 ohm resistors here that effectively turns on that transistor. That has the add advantage if the battery the cell voltage was really low. it will bring the cell voltage up till the processor kicks in.

Once the processor kicks in, it can do two things: It can monitor for dusk by just looking at that pin as an input, but it can also when it detects that the cell is up to about 4.2 volts theoretically. Uh, it can actually shunt this down. it can pull this to low and it turns that uh transistor off theoretically. I'm guessing this 100K resistor is partly a load just to for stability and also so it can sense the voltage properly.

For dusk sensing, there's a microcontroller with it output that enables the infrared and pass infrared with their little decoupling capacitor. It just turns them off when they're not needed and turns them on when they're needed. Um, it's just so when you click the button to the off mode, it just shuts down completely cuz otherwise those should have a slight quiescent current. Then there's the big cluster of cold white LED which are turned on by this A2shb mosfet which is an N Channel mosfet.

It's an A2shb which is a really popular choice 1K gate resistor and 100K pull down resistor. They seem to like their 100K resistors. They've used very standard values, but the Uh microcontroller for controlling the flashing LEDs The effect: LEDs has a 1K resistor going to the base of a standard NP resistor and then that mystery 1 ohm resistor and then the micro controller itself which then just drives the LEDs directly. and I suppose a lot of the current limiting.

there is just purely the Uh, the pin or the microcontroller, although I did measure it peing at 50 milliamps as it was doing just the two channel effects which isn't that great for battery life. Also, pushing the mic controller quite hard, they are kind of abusing it, but that is it. That is your uh flame effect. your really crap flame effect solar light.

Um, it's interesting. It works. It's fairly generic. haven't tested.

uh if this shuts off properly at the fuel charge, going to the lack of sunshine, largely because I've done this video in winter. But not to worry. Uh, But there we have it. A very basic cell.

just the usual stuff. It's one of those generic eBay Solar Lighting Products It kind of works. It's a bit odd, but it is relatively fun just to play with.