I've just discovered another step in the evolution of LED lamps and it's not a good one. This is a down casting of the maximum LED lamps and I've just bought this one and opened it and the first thing I noticed was the fact that the Silicon glue that they used to actually attach the front was completely covering one of the LEDs and the circuitry is fairly typical for these. But what's interesting is that this rectangular hole here normally has a little insert in it that they can plug the capacitor into and it provides two things: it provides electrical insulation where it goes through the aluminum core circuit board, and it also provides a bit of thermal insulation so the capacity can be mounted without direct connection to the aluminum heat sink, and likewise, they don't seem to. They've got their similar Arrangement normally lamps like this for the mains incoming Supply wires from the back of the lamp cap, but in this case they've actually just got a cut out an edge of the circuit board of the wires folded over.

And here's the thing. this is an aluminum core PCB and it has an ultra fine shim of fiberglass this a white layer here and just to provide electrical separation from the between the LEDs and the heatsink, but in this case because they've got the capacitor leads just folded across. there is a possibility particularly see here that they're actually in very close vicinity to the aluminum backplane, and likewise, where these wires are fully drowned, there's no guarantee they're not going to touch that aluminum. So I wonder how many of these lamps are actually going to go bang when turned on because they've just cut the insulation so fine that there's virtually nothing there that they're on the edge of just touching that aluminum? It's not very impressive, but tell you what, let's reverse this.

LED lamp anyway. One Amendment please and resume and there are no great surprises. There's a 10 ohm fusible resistor tucked in down here in the base that, uh, limits in Rush current, but it also acts like a fuse if something goes wrong like, say, for instance, the wires touched the aluminum circuit board. We've got a bridge wrecked fire that this bit here.

we've got a one Meg Ohm load resistor. The reason for that? It's got two purposes: It provides a slight load to avoid ghost gluing of the LEDs through capacitive coupling between the switch wires very common interior switching. And then it's got the 3.3 megafied 400 volt capacitor here. and that resistor.

Also, make sure that when the lights turned off, it goes out instantly instead of just fading away as would happen if you remove this resistor. Quite a nice effect. I Have to say, quite useful, but does leave a bit of a charge on the air capacitor. Then we've got a matrix of seven LEDs I Reckon that each LED probably contains 15 chips.

They really have cut down the number of LEDs here by using multi-chip LEDs And then we've got an FM 3081 style linear current regulator where you set the current through it by a 39 Ohm Reserve Well, in this case, a 39 Ohm resistor. Normally they have a couple of resistors in parallel, which is nice because it makes it easier to hack. You can just chop one of them off because they're in parallel and it reduces the current. But in this case, you'd actually have to change this resistor here completely to change the rating of the lamp and to lower it.

Or if you wanted to, you could theoretically increase it, but the LEDs are already pushed to the very hilt. Um, but that is it. They've really skimped in so many ways and apparently the quality of manufacturer control has also been skimped. This is a the lowest of the low, but it's interesting, interesting how things like this sort of evolve over time.

We've seen them go from quite complex lamps. We've seen them. Oh, let's not go out too far. that's just showing everything in the bench.

We've seen them going from quite complex lamps to the very simplified lamps. I Know what we're seeing now is cost cutting to make sure that these lamps don't last too long, and they're just the cheapest, nastiest disposable things for manufacturer. Uh, short life and then discarding. That is apparently the future of LED lighting, but it's still interesting to explore.

It's quite fun watching it evolve.