This is a little tiny USB Mood Light designed to plug into a USB port and provide illumination and in multiple colors, but it's original intended purpose is to quote from the listing its title is Mini RGB USB LED Cart light interior, mood, neon atmosphere, ambient lamp Wireless and the short plugged into USB outlets on the dashboard for elimination. Nice. Now this thing has a dusk. Center I Didn't know that initially, just it was very hard getting to grips with this.

It also has no documentation. It's got a single button that has multiple functions and two RGB LEDs the type you'd find in video walls. So to demonstrate this, I'm going to have to plug it into this port and they're going to have to turn the lights off. So initially it's ramped up to oh no, it's not good.

Well it is. It's light sensors are kicking in and it's a sort of turn the light on off. So I'm gonna have to turn the lights off to show you this going through its color sequence one moment please. I'll just set that up right now.

here we go. So initially it's set to the red mode. It has multiple cars that can go through. We've got uh, one click makes it dim down, can back up in yellow, and then another click comes up.

a set of like what they call fluorescent green. which is reason enough it looks fluorescent green. The next click is green, just a pair of green chips. Oh that's bright.

Then the next click is to cyan. They call that ice blue. Quite a nice color. One of my favorite colors of these.

Then it comes that deep blue that is just a pure blue from the LEDs and then comes magenta I think which is the red and the blue chips and then their interpretation of white which is just basically whatever color it came out. It's not bad, looks, a very cold white doesn't it? And if you press it again, it starts going through a little color sequence and uh, doing various things. It just basically ramps up and down through all the different colors. Now there is another mood here.

If I go back to say for instance, the let's go to a nicer color. So let's go to the Cyan one. There we go. If you double click it, it starts ramping up and down.

if you double click it again. while it's at one of its levels, it, it's basically intensity mode. So if you choose, say for instance, the lowest level and double click it there. it'll stop that When you select other colors from no one, they'll just be at that level.

You've basically set the master intensity level. Double click it again. It starts ramping up and down again. catch to the top this time and it's at the full brightness.

It has another feature. if you press and hold it uh, Fades away and it stays off, Press and hold, it fades up again and it's back right? Okay, one moment please. I'm just about to bring the it's gone into the uh intensity mode again. okay uh and bring the light back.

watch your eyes. Okay, time to start taking it a bit. So let's Zoom down a bit in this and then I shall get the spudger in I don't think there's any I don't think there's any hardware I think it really is just a friction fit. Not really sure we'll find out when I break it.

Oh, that bits come off, that bit has come off and uh, it's one of those combined circuit board and is this going to come out at all? It's just slider. Oh, it's a plastic housing with the circuit board in it, right? Okay, so if I just pop that out. Now that's quite neat actually. Um, it reveals the some resistors.

I'll take a picture of both sides and we can explore it together. one moment. Please, let's explore. so no great surprises.

It's very straightforward. it's the I'll Zoom down this a little bit. It's the microcontroller, the classic eight pin microcontroller. very similar pin out again to pick 12, particularly because the pin that's not used as one that would normally be used as the uh, the programming voltage pin, the master reset pin, master clear pin, but it has effectively got two inputs.

It's got the button input and it's got a light sensor just basically uh, photodiode in series with the resistor across the rails, which gives a voltage on the input depending on the light levels which it may actually just be detached to a logic level change. We've got two of the video wall style RGB LEDs and they're in parallel and there's one resistor per color red, green, blue with a higher value of resistor for the red which is 120 ohms and 91 ohms to blue and green and a decoupling capacitor. That is it. Let's take a look at the schematic.

Here is the schematic: I shall Zoom down just a little bit further. So the USB connector only has two connections positive and negative. It doesn't of the data pins connected so it can't negotiate a higher voltage. I Mentioned that because people will say well, if you plugged it into Quick Charge nothing will happen.

You'll plug it. You have to actually negotiate via the data pins a higher voltage and five volts so it's going to be 5 volts by default. I Measured this in the circuit this 24K resistor. Tricky because uh, it's going to be affected by the input to the microcontroller and that the conductance of this and other stuff.

So 24K is a rough value. It sounds about right for a potential divider, but there's the photodiode and there's the resistor that forms that potential divider. As the light increases, it effectively lowers the voltage across this and that uh changes the state on the processor. As the as it gets darker, let's go higher resistance and basically all go positive to actually turn it on the button.

It's got an internal weak pull up and the button just pulls that down to the zero volt reel. And then we've got the three pairs of LEDs Red, green and blue with the bondage 20, 91, 91 and it's 20 milliamp per color so that when all are lit. but when you get Piers let's say for instance, Magenta, you've got the red and blue. That's 40 milliamps Cyan my favorite of the colors there.

Well, the magenta is quite nice as well. The green and blue is about 40 milliamps, but if all three are lit for white, then it's 60 milliamps. but that's it. Full intensity if you use the dimming down in this.

if you actually control it by using that double click function to go into the intensity mode, you can then tame that down to a lower current not that you might want to I Don't think because it's not pushing these LEDs too hard. Those LEDs there I pointed to the left there because I was thinking of the actual schematic itself. Those LEDs but that is it is notable in the circuit board. They did leave themselves one option.

They left themselves another decoupling capacitor option in parallel with this one, which is useful enough. It's a good thing to do, that's that decoupling capacitor there. and but that's it. A very simple and fairly neat look at the size of it.

It's tiny little RGB mood light. Once you've actually worked out all the button combinations and the fact that it's got the light sensor, then it makes a lot more sense. Note that it can detect the light if it's on the borderline from the LEDs in the light Center and sometimes that makes it just ramp up and down at the sort of transition from uh, from One Night level to another. But that is it.

It's a nice little device, nicely designed. Not quite sure what you'd use it for, but it's It's a fairly neat implementation and useful just as a kind of novelty and a fun thing.