Many, many years ago, I Bought a set of solar lights and they had a single common solar panel and a single nickel metal hydride cell in the first circuit. and then cables ran out to these little bollards and it was quite nice. But while experimenting as I do I Stock A 2D Cell battery pack in just so the unit would operate autonomously and it glows very gently. Let me show you it.

glowing. Here it is gluing. not terribly bright, just a gentle ambient light. But it was quite nice.

Okay, one moment, please, the light is coming back. Watch your eyes, the light is back. So I'll show you what's inside this. It's not very complicated, it's a nice stainless steel tube.

I Mean it's sometimes worth buying cheap solar lights just for the components because uh, you can't buy stuff like that for less than the packs of solar lights. But if I prize this out. Inside is a little tiny circuit board with one LED in it. It's a straw hat.

LED I Probably changed the LED because no doubt it was cold. White and the original form and the only other component on each of these lights is a resistor in the back. a little surface mount resistor with a value of 56 ohms. There it is.

There two bars coming on. 56 ohm surface mode resistor and an LED in that set. No problem. So what I did with this? I Put the batteries in and I just leave it as a decorative table light.

Just a gentle glow, just as an ornament. But it turned out it was very, very, useful because when I spent a lot more time here on the Isle of Man nursing my mother uh, the Isle of Man is very, very dark at night. super jet black and I have hypnagogia if you don't know what that is, it's the transition between being awake and being asleep. and all sorts of stuff happened during that time.

and my manifestation of that was that I would see lots of bodies walking around my bed. literally, my bed. It might have been in the middle of the High Street I would see Shadows of people just all around it and it was, quite frankly, quite scary. It's always happened since I was a kid.

It's just one of these things the other manifestation of hypnagogy and you might associate with this is that you get morphing fractal patterns in Your Vision Lots of bright colors and really complex shapes that would take pretty much a fairly perfect computer to generate your brain. does it randomly. that's hypnagogia. Look up.

it's very interesting and I found the best way to alleviate that was to use this. and so I put it in the bedroom and it doesn't. It's not that bright, it's just one. LED And keep in mind that this is just two, uh, double a nickel metal hydride cells.

So the voltage of these when they're sort of normal state is around about 1.2 volts each, and that's very close to the LED so it just gently glows. but in the plus side of that, it might not seem very bright, but it was enough to just splash a bit of light into the room. Just a tiny amount of light at night that I could actually see everything in the room and it got rid of the Shadows which resulted in much easier sleep I Have to say the other upside of that is that this can just run 24 7. It can be steal it all the time and it only needs recharged approximately once every three or four months.

It's ridiculously how long it runs particularly well. obviously with the low self discharge uh, nickel metal, Hydride sells a decent capacity, so I Thought it'd be quite interesting to show you how you can make one of these with just a standard battery pack. You know, this sort of battery pack you get with a string of LED lights from say Asda which is where these came from or Walmart or wherever pound shops, dollar stores, wherever. And what I did was for a variety I actually put a connector in and since the other system used a five six Ohm resistor I just stuck a 56 Ohm resistor in as well I don't know if it really matters I don't think it really matters that much, but I did and what that means is I can just plug LEDs into this and if you make one of these as many purposes if you've got uh, young kids, more of an adult that has that slight issue if you live in somewhere that's very, very dark no street light at night, this is like a nightlight, but not too intrusive and it has that super long run time.

But it also has the facility to be useful if you're living off grid just as an ambient light source because although it's not very bright, your eyes are extremely sensitive. so in effect, it is actually very useful as a gentle ambient source of light. Now I'll draw your schematic. Oh, I should have planned this lot to page the schematic.

this was this was a hellish schematic to reverse engineer, but this one is much easier. Here are your two cells and they are connected via a switch. The switch is entirely optional through that 56 Ohm resistor which could be anywhere in the circuit and then through a single LED. Now the LED has to be a gallium nitride.

LED if you use the red LEDs or the old-fashioned green LEDs Apart from the low efficiency, their voltage is low enough that it will actually run the batteries flat quite quickly because the lower voltage is below this of like the threshold the the average voltage of these cells. So I'd recommend a white LED but you can use any color you want ultimately. Um, but the other interesting thing you could do, you could get a cheap solar light a couple of cheap solar lights, and you could add their little solar panels. Let's just drama solar panels and write s in them.

You could put a couple in series with a diode charging those cells and you know the little things you, they're roughly that size. You get the little solar panels off the top of our uh, solar garden light and that would actually keep that top top. So if you're off grid, you'd have a 24-hour light 24 7 light that during the daylight it just topped up and the batteries will literally never run flat. because this Led here is drawing microamps and it's the joy of modern Gallium Nitride LEDs that they are super low current and by putting a socket on it, it lets you plug in.

other. LEDs I Used a sort of more Axi type connector. Let me just let me just pause my turn and just go and get the number of this character because it has a specific weird number that you can find on eBay one moment, please. The number is Kf2510.

If you search on EB for that, you'll find these little sort of more Axi type connectors. I tend to get mine from Rapid Electronics in the UK but where you get yours depends where you are. You buy the connector shell separately and you buy the contacts and you can also buy a Chromebook tools. Not not super expensive, it's not super cheap.

Also takes a bit getting used to, but it's actually worthwhile if you end up using these connectors a lot. but the fact you've got a connector means that you can just swap in other. LEDs for instance, let me just crop this one down. Chop.

You can Jam LEDs into your heart's content. this one. It doesn't matter. You put them in the wrong way around.

they won't light. This is a diffused white LED I've yet to try this to see what they look like. the diffuse ones. Having said that, this is about as much diffusion as you're gonna get.

Uh, and this one is a pink LED I Believe courtesy of AliExpress A nice big cup on it and a large area of phosphor and it just gives that nice sort of glow. and so that is it. This, if you've got kids who have hypnagogia or adults who have hypnagogia, this device will, potentially, um, be very useful. You just sit it upright Like that point in the ceiling? it's going to splash some light.

You're going to be able to see what's in the room at night, and it's going to get rid of those spooky manifestations. Um, what else is there to say if you're off grid? If you're in the middle of nowhere, if you're in a forest in the pitch black at night. This thing, despite the fact that super low current, will actually still be a very useful light. And as I say, on a set of low self discharge uh, nickel metal hydride cells, that's kind of important.

I Kind of recommend Eneloop or the Modern Panasonic the ones that just are specified as being pre-charged and low self-discharge They will run for so long you don't even need to turn it off at night, you can just leave it switched on and it will just run for months between charges. Or if you add the little solar hack on it, then potentially it will never ever need recharged again. And that is the ghost repelling off-grid light.