Means voltage LED tape. but this version has a linear cob strip in it so it produces very diffused elimination along its length. I'm going to have to warn your advantage just in case this may have a bit of flicker because I'm about to turn this on and it is unsmooth. so if I turn the dimmer on.

I Got the dimmer so we could take it apart too. initially. the strip comes on a very low level and as I turn it up, it's dead for most of the part rotation. Then subnet comes on and it's a bit flickery around about that point if you try turning on, but it really doesn't dim that well.

but you wouldn't expect that given that it looks like they've used phase angle control and that doesn't really suit the LEDs too much. So what we're going to do: I'm going to unplug this, then we're going to take. We'll open the plug as well. We'll open this unit and we'll also strip a section of this and we'll see what the construction is like inside.

So let's start off with the plug and see how they put a fuse in it. They have. They've used. Um, they've got the blue green to live.

Badly terminated. Oh, look at that. Look at that. That is just dire.

That's not how you terminate a plug in the UK. That is pretty bad. The blue and the brown and the wrong terminals doesn't really matter because for uh, ungrounded item. but the uh, the fuse here.

let's get the fuse out. It's also not been terminated very well. It's very strandy now. This fuse, if it's a real fuse, should have sand in it.

Let's uh, crack it open, see if the sand. No, there's no sand in it. So it's an uncompliant fuse and a known compliant wiring of the plug. Excellent.

This is a good start. The case is just bulging open here. Let's say I Get back out here so you can see more of it. The knob just pulls off the front.

lovely, putting one's knob off and it opens very easily to reveal what looks like a standard dimmer followed by a bridge rectifier. Um, or was it it's the bridge, right? Fargo in the input that may be and it may be a thyristor it's using for the fuse angle control. We shall find that out when I Reverse engineer: The end bit is the usual thing that comes off fairly easy and just filled with sticky stuffing. There's something spill of the sticky stuff.

Well, this might not be coming across off easily. That's better. They're usually full of a gooey sticky substance. No, this one looks as though it may be glued on.

Okay, that's good. and this, uh thing. this connector here is just clipped on. Can I unclip that I think I'll probably unclip like that and when we take it out, we can see it's just got two little metal tabs that seem to make a friction fit just against the uh, the LED tape inside.

Interesting, right? Say what? I'm going to take some photos, reverse engineer and then we'll see what the secretary looks like One moment, please. the reverse engineering is done. But before we take a look at the circuitry, let's actually do what I should have done the first bit of the video and do an electrical test. and I've cut one meter off and for safety.

I've put the end cap in this end and then just cobbled together a bridge phone stock at this end and we'll now stick it into the terminals of the Hoppy. So this can be the dangerous and let's hope it doesn't pop off. Well, let's hope it does pop off. Uh, if I plug this in there, it lights up.

No flicker. That's because the camera is compensating for that. Oh, it's so flickery it is really unpleasant. Uh, it's showing 34 milliamps a staggering 0.921 Perfect.

That's completely wrong. It's the hobby is misinterpreting this because it's not that good. and uh, almost eight. Watts For this section, you can also see the outline of all the LEDs on the back of it, but a very diffused.

a very diffused line in the front. I Heard it popping and crackling there. That was a my Wiggly connections. That's a proper quality.

Things worthy of note here: if you actually look down the end of this and it is useful to know this, you can actually see particularly magnifying glass or good eyes. you can actually see how we plus main assemble on either side so you know the polarity And it's interesting to note that the end termination had blue as positive and brown is negative. This is also copper coated aluminum wire which is just I Gave it the flame test and it just meant all blimp and crumbly and burst into flame. So that's good.

Not really, but it's keeping with the quality of the product. So I have pooled a sex to the strip out and done a bit of reverse engineering. Uh, so we'll bring in initially a picture of the LED tape. so Focus down onto that and zoom in a little bit so this is our section.

I'll just actually no. I'll just keep keep there. That's that's pretty good. We have the tabs at the half meter sections, the 20 inch sections for connecting.

you're rectified Supply on. So here's the positive bus bar going along. Here's a negative bus bar and it's using what are called flip chips. It's a little tiny LEDs that there's no packages such as the LED is engineered with a little tiny contact in the back of each chip.

So they literally pick and place the bare LEDs onto this material and then seemingly flu so to them or I'm. not sure if they've sold them or sellers thing, but they are effectively sorted on. So we have sections of one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, LEDs and then a resistor. There's a resistor there.

there's a resistor there, it's tapped off the bus bar at this end, and the LEDs are wired as pairs Wireless peers and then those pairs award. In the series, we have 72 uh, parallel sections 144 LEDs and we've also got 18 resistors scattered along that. Um, so it Taps on a positive at this end goes through all the LEDs and resistors and then goes on to the negative. the other end and that just basically acts like a little string of Christmas lights.

but in each half meter or 20 inches, the plastic Channel this is it ripped open because I took the tip outer has the channel That The LED tape has fed. anyone know how to do that, but it's fed in. and there's the Dome of the phosphor, an area of sort of air to spread the light about so it shines, diffuses through the distance, and then the final diffusing layer before the light comes out. And that's the sort of layer of gel that I basically peeled off by swiping a knife along this.

So the LEDs probably didn't survive and at this parallel circuitry is just a way of fitting more LEDs in a single circuit. But it also means that one LED feels it's not going to result in the whole string feeling or a dark too much was dark spot because the one next it will steal it. It's possibly just to cheat a little bit. Okay, let's take a look at the Hideous dimmer.

So the Hideous dimmer looks like this actual zoom out. It has what appears to be a fuse I Thought it was a fusible resistor, but it's got an odd value orange, black, red which would mean 3 000 ohms. It's definitely not three thousand. Almost a dead short.

that makes you think it's 3 000 milliamps so it may actually be a fuse. Not sure about that. that would be three amps. Put your this bridge.

rectifiers. rated about four amps so that kind of fits. There is a track, a timing capacitor, a snubber network with a really oddly high value resistor here. I Wonder if they just use the standard circuit and they just included it because Ebb DLS includes it.

But in reality, if they'd use the 100 ohm resistor you'd normally use in something like this, it meant would have meant that the LEDs would just not have gone out even at the lowest setting because it just it would pass enough current to meet them glow brightly as it is, even with the 200k resistor, that section glued visibly and it was the current going through this capacitor and that resistor that was doing that. Very weird. uh, standard dimmer circuit with uh, the potentiometer and a hidden 10 key resistor underneath. uh, charging this capacitor up until it reaches a threshold voltage of a Diac which is under here.

and then it triggers the triac. The track is a Btb04-600 S L uh sensitive gate triac um 500k potentiometers. The hidden 10K resistor. there is the Diac.

The twisty control has a switch on it as well, which breaks the connection here. There's a little snubber that goes between Mt1 and Mt2 of the track, and there's the gate being triggered by the Diac when the capacitor charges up. and there's the bridge rectifier noting that as I say with the cable, it was like it was. the negative, was brown and positive was blue.

Quite odd. and there's that mystery resistor component. Let's take a look at the schematic. Now, should we look at the Led first? I Think we should.

Two little schematics starting off with the LED strip just to show the rough construction. Although pretty much described it, the 72 pairs of LEDs I worked out probably theoretically roundabout 200 volts across those the 1820 ohm resistors based on the current AC kind of current. Uh, the 2160 Ohms should have had 73 volts across it, but it's skewed by the fact it is not just a humpy, rectified sound wave, but it's also only lighting at the top of that, as demonstrated by the dimmer, just not working below that level. Here's the construction of those LEDs going in their little parallel pairs with the resistors and that is them as represent the circuit diagram.

this repeated several times. along the length, the eight LEDs has four parallel pairs in the series and then the 120 Ohm resistor 81 34 milliamp 0.925 per Factor. The power fact cannot be believed in this instances. It would be interesting seeing the waveform that I can pretty much guess that it's just going to be at the top of the sine wave.

It's lighting the LEDs because you have to exceed the combined forward voltage to make them light. which is odd. That's why this dimmer when you turn it up, it just it's dead for most of it. and it's only when it can get high enough into the sine wave that the LEDs will light.

Having said that, even because of the shape of the sine wave, let me draw a sine wave. Oh, let's uh yeah, that's half a sine wave. Okay, if it was full, we've rectified through this: Bridge Farm The LEDs would be lighting up here, so maybe that is a fairly accurate they'd be lighting that this section here. So maybe in relative terms that is faking the power factor because uh, it's only the small area in here that it can't relate.

Um, so the neutral comes in and it goes through that switch. It then feeds one end of the track which then switches it through to the direct fire but the triac. The timing is controlled by this potentiometer and this fixed value resistor. To limit current of your screw the potential onto the far end and on each the star to each half of the sine wave, it starts charging up this capacitor.

When the voltage reaches round about 30 volts, this Diac suddenly conducts and dumps the capacitor into the gate of the track, turning it on and when it turns on, it latches on and say, for instance, you've turned it on at the midpoint of the same way, but it would stay on until the zero Crossing points the same wave. When the current, the priority changes, the current goes to zero briefly and the track just resets because these latch on until the current through is reduced to zero. Then on the other half of the sine wave, it starts charging this capacitor again and uh, once again it would. It charges it in the reverse this time because it is doing the AC And once again, when it reaches the threshold across this capacitor that the Diac triggers, it fires the track again.

Here's a Snubber network. A snubber network is designed to just clip a sharp transients across the most the triac because of the triac. If you suddenly switch current across very quickly uh, like a spike or come with inductive loads, it causes lots of problems. It can actually falsely turn the try icon.

So what they do is they put a capacitor across usually 100 nanifiers with a 100 ohm resistor in series and that just acts as little filter that just absorbs that Spike Because that Spike has to charge that capacitor up before it can really affect the voltage too much there, and that stops the track being mistriggered. When the track switches on, it feeds the AC end of the rectifier. The other end is fed via that mysterious 3 amp fuse 3000 milliamp I Think that's what it is and uh, that then gets rectified to put out the DC to the LEDs. It's very straightforward.

it's not the best choice, so it's an interesting strip. Visually, it's quite robust. It's quite nice. It's a very linear stripe of light, but the downside is that this stuff is because it's got no smoothing.

It's very flickery, but there is a hack you could do if you use the capacitive dropper uh, and uh, a current limiting resistor and smoothing. You could actually, for whatever length of run, you just adjust the current to match because this will glow up very, very low current. So you could theoretically just create a power supply that would run this at that reduced current and it would just have an ambient glow. Something that's not too intrusive, something, just gentle visual glue.

Because it is fairly linear, it seems to be quite evenly little on the full run, and that could last for a very, very long time. And if you use smoothing, it wouldn't have any flicker. I Certainly wouldn't want to use this in the kitchen, which is probably where it'll find its use with the sort of kitchen. Fitters Put them under the the countertops um, and the the cupboards above them and that, uh, to me, that would.

the flicker would be very, very annoying because you'd see it out the side of your eye. It's that sort of thing. You might not see it looking directly at it, but in your peripheral vision, which is designed to detect Flickr You'll see that straw being flickering, particularly in the UK because it does it at 100 Hertz uh, slightly higher frequency 120 hertz in the USA but that is it. It's interesting stuff.

The construction itself is fairly nice. The dimmer is completely unsitted to it. They could actually have put the dimmer with a thyristor after the uh, the rectifier. They could have done that differently, but having said that, it's not great anyway.

And the radial hands will hate the fact that it doesn't have any interference suppression, so it's going to create lots of electrical noise. But there we go. It's interesting stuff. but I Don't recommend it.

However, it was interesting to explore. It was quite interesting in that way.