And two lamps from India that a friend bought me while I was over there. I'm getting Deja Vu as if I've featured these before, but I'm not really sure. However, let's explore them anyway and repair this one. Well, if we can repair it because um, this one is not doing what it's supposed to do.

It's got its little flashing color changing lights here, but the near and flicker flame is just barely gluing at the bottom. and my friend said that when he went to the shop, this was the last one. The shop is the one in the window display and when he said the guy, uh, do you have others the guy said no, this is it uh if you want it, you can have it. uh, the reason it's not flickering because it needs to warm up and the guy was talking it.

It never warmed up but my friend got it anyway because he knew that. You know I just appreciate them for what they are. Lurid Religious tat, don't you just love it? The Indians love their writing. I like that that part of the culture too.

Their religions are much more fun so they come apart quite easily. despite the fact that there's glue plastered all down there. you can see where it's been dribbling down the side. These are very much handmade and when you open it up, there is a big suti Mark in the lead up to that.

uh, the neon lamp and lots of crusty tape. can I pull that off? Oh oh, they're two Smoky resistors. Let's take a look at them. look at that.

Let's see if I can focus down on that. they're they're smoked. Can you read the color code? Yes, that's right. It's black, black, black.

That's correct. Uh, let's take a closer look at those. In fact, is there anything left? the color code at all? Uh, there is blue, gray and then something. very vague.

and then also, our tolerance is very vague. so, uh, not terribly helpful. Let's get this out: AB Table I'll take the whole Auto where are my side Cutters and I'll just pop these little things out. This is a beanic cap lampholder I Guess they use them in India too.

It's common in the UK and if you just prowse these little pins out, everything should hopefully just drop out. Maybe it won't drop out. Maybe I'm telling Brooke is. maybe tell him pork is.

Oh no. there it goes. So what do we have? We have, uh, delightful. Is there a discharge resistor? There is a discharge resistor one mag that's good.

What's the value of the capacitor for the LEDs It's 0.22 microfired 220 Nano And it's got the lovely the typical of these. It's got the lovely circuit board which is so functional. Uh, let me just draw this out. Hold on Notepad Focus Down onto there.

What they have are quite a big resistor as well. So they've got the two terminals coming in. One has a capacitor on it with a discharge resistor, so that's 220 Nanofarad classic capacitive dropper for this application and it's got what appears to be a one Mega Ohm resistor across it. Hold on.

Brown, black, green, one zero, and five zeros one Meg Ohm. And it's designed to discharge that capacitor if it wasn't there. You'd get a sting off the pins at the back of the lamp if it held a charge. And it's got a very generous in-rush limiting resistor of 100 ohms.

Quite a high power rating as well that looks like a one watt resistor. it's been. yeah, it's metal film, so it's probably one watt Richard at. and it's going to a very, very simple Bridge rectifier.

They've literally got the square circuit board with pads on each corner. and they've got a diode actually configured as a bridge rectifier on it, so they'll be pointing that way. This will be the AC this will be AC That'll be positive and that'll be negative. but they've also taken those in to pads there and they've got a capacitor sat on that as well.

What's the value of the capacitor? Let me just bend this resistor back. It is a 400 volt capacitor. Is it or is it the going for a higher value of capacitance at lower voltage? You'll not even see anything here. I Might look at the right side here.

Hold on. Let me just add 50 volts. 33 microfired. Okay, right.

50 volt, 33 micro farad. That's quite an odd value of capacitor. It also means that when the if the LEDs go up in circuit, that capacitor is going to spew its guts as they do, it will fail in a sort of sizzling, popping its lid off type away. So the circuitry looks like this.

It's got the capacitor across it and then it's got the LEDs lots of LEDs in series and these are the simple LEDs that just alternate between either red and blue or red and green and it means there's always one LED on. So they're not actually ever going to go open circuit. Well, unless they feel so. 50 volt 33 microfarad I'll write that in Over there.

that is the circuitry. The neon lamp. They've used Two. What? I'm guessing.

Now, typically with a neon lamp like this in the on 220 to 240 volts, you have roughly 30k in series. So they've used 268 K resistors in parallel to give roughly 34. Okay, so I'm guessing the missing band is orange and that means that their dissipation has been probably over half a watt each. And these are quarter watt resistors.

All right, Tell you what. let's do some experiments. I'm going to set an experiment up and we shall test this new lamp at various currents by bridging lots of resistors in parallel until it reaches a decent intensity. One moment, please.

Well, it's fixed, but not the way I was expecting. Let me show you this in the dark and I'll warn you in advance that it is quite flashy. So if you're sensitive to flashing lights, uh, turn away now. Ah yes, sparkling in its Indian Glory but with a very different little neon lamp here, you'll see it is a flicker flame lamp, but it's not the original one which is over here.

so watch your eyes, the light is coming back. So it turned out there was a problem with this lamp right down at the base I don't know what's actually happened to it, but uh, it's degraded and these resistors, although they were absolutely smoked I mean they are just black. The rough value I thought they might be was at 68k. they were fairly close to that and just out of Interest I swapped in a 33k high power resistor, put it in the series and it passed all the correct current for one of these lamps, but the orange glow was just basically concentrated at the bottom.

It wasn't covering the whole lamp so I looked for Alternatives One possibility was to find, well order up uh, another neon candle lamp and try and get glass globe out. But then I thought what if I use uh, sort of one of the Christmas lighting tape lamps because you get these ones for the little neon candelabras or that you get strings of the neon flick flame lamps. but that would have required a dedicated bass which is exactly what I did. Let me just put this out the way: uh 3D printed an insert that goes in place of this and it sits in from inside.

Let me just open it. It sits in from inside with lots of glue, smooth all over it as the original construction had and it's sized to take. uh M10 Lamp holder M10 can be used in 240 volts, but it's not the best choice, but it is what these little lamps use. So this, uh, the contacts fall back and it pushes down with Force into that and then when you've done that, it can screw in.

but there is a slight problem with that. This is 3D printed. it's 3D printed in Pla, which one is one of the softer Plastics and the base of these lamps because the way they work, they have that smoke and heart resistor inside that certainly on 240 volts versus 120 volts, it's dissipating a lot more power It's usually the resistor in these that fails instead of the lamp itself and well in Europe Anyway, so to reduce the dissipation of that, I put a 100 nanofarad resistor in series with this lamp and it's got a one Meg Ohm resistor cross. So the reason for that is because otherwise you can get a slight tingle off the pins when you touch them if it holds a charge.

So that's a discharge resistor and that has reduced the power accordingly. so everything is now reassembled. Another thing I Noticed these: the LEDs they put in these. They stuck the LED through from this side and they've basically just folded leads over and twisted them.

They've not soldered them and then they've glued these things on the top and it's quite a neat. It must be quite laborious actually making the lamp, but uh, now this screws in and unlike the some of the very cheap and nasty adapters you get on eBay this one has a shroud that does prevent finger contact. Could have been slightly higher I think but it's not bad and hopefully the temperature of that. It certainly didn't get hot during testing, but hopefully temperature that will stay low enough that it doesn't soften the plastic and make the lamp holder work loose.

But that is the fix of this Uh Vina lamp with the faulty flame. It wasn't the resistors I was expecting it. Turned out it was the name Globe itself and now you can actually just unscrew and change the lamp if needs be if it ever ages. Although Hung said that with the capacitron series and the built-in resistor, the dissipation will be reduced to the point that the lamp will probably last well, forever, probably relatively speaking.

So that is it. The interesting Indian Ceremonial lights, decorative lights. Um, and well, a slight hack I suppose Ultimately, you could use this to do anything you wanted with them, but a nice result and that was quite fun to make. It took me about 10 minutes to design this object and open the scad, and then it took me about 15 minutes to actually print it off.

So it was quite a fast project that way.