It's an LED street light. Fortunately, it's a small LED street light so it does actually fit in the bench. This is an indoor Air1 and I'll give you some of the specs for this light, then I'll show you it lit and then we'll take it to Biz. So it is an indoor air one road and its main features are direct drive technology I Wonder what it meant by that? Turns out the electronics are on the actual LED panel itself.

what we'd call a dob driver on board. There is no driver actually in the base here. Uh, low windage? What that means? It's got low resistance to wind lightweight fitting. It's definitely quite lightweight.

not super lightweight, but these things are solid aluminium so they're They're always pretty hefty. They have to be no hinges. Clips or Lids I Kind of wish this one did have a hinge, but it doesn't really matter. I Can understand where they're going here.

Integrated Long Life Photo cell. In this case. it's got a socket in the back. Uh, a Nema socket for photo cells? Uh, Excellent thermal management.

Fully sealed and it does. quot? Um, a superior lifetime 230,000 hours. Quick and simple to install. It looks fairly straightforward.

Yep, right? Tell you what? Um, when we go inside, it's this one is rated about 18 Watts I think um, but they're apparently available from 5 to 35 watt. Um, the control for the dimming. You can get it a preset intens I'm not sure what it means preset dimming here I Don't know if that's just a switched input, but it's also got the Del Uh control which is a network control and I'll show you that in a moment. Um, what else has it got to say? Reliability: 0.58 failures per million operating hours Sounds quite good.

and there's the 230,000 hour rating. Oh, Risk Group Lg1 for the LEDs What that means is it's not too damaging to the eyes unless you're right up against it. And then it's got a couple of Uh photometric patterns available depending on the application. Okay, so this thing uh is designed to clamp either on top of a pole, a straight vertical pole uh with these grub screws at the side and the typical size will be 76 mm, but these go in quite deep.

and I Also, notice that this bracket at the bottom here can be moved backwards and forwards. Don't know if you can see that? Where's the a little source of light? I Had a little source of light? If we take a look in there, there's a little bracket in there that could be moved backwards and forwards. I Think that may be a way of changing the angle just slightly of the light. Um, you also get adapters for different size poles like this that can actually be sat in uh and then the they get clamped onto the pole uh and the center pole and then these get clamped onto it.

The other option is for a pole I Think it's rated for a 60 mm uh bracket coming off the top of the pole in the side here. Not quite sure what the clamping system is here. I Think it just does rely on these two grub screws. uh, centering up.

Anyway, let's show you it lit. I'll put them down there. now. on the back we have the NIMA socket.

Neema is an industry standard. I'll just not demolish the place here. Nema is an industry standard for the photo cells and this is the one it came with. Uh.

Normally the traditional photo cell just has three connections. it's got a big neutral connection, then it's get live and and uh, switched live to the load. But this one has the extra four connections which are two for Smart City Network and two for the Del Network. Both of those are lighting control networks now because I'm going to be trying this out right now.

Uh, I'm going to have to put in a shunting plug. What this does, is it basically just bypasses that. It's worth mentioning that this has none of the networks on it. it's just purely a relay to switch the light on and off and the light doesn't just light up instantly.

It's quite interesting. So, I put that shuning plug in and this is where it's not going to get super bright because it is a fairly lowlevel street light. I Shall hold this back here and I'll plug it in. You'll initially see a flash as the circuitry activates and then it will come up.

It will actually power half the LEDs and then the other ones. Then it will ramp up. Are you ready? They all seem. Did they actually did that? Actually do it? Hold on.

I'm going to try again. No, this time they all came on together. That's interesting. Wonder what that is? Oh I wonder if it's no.

I don't know if this has any sensing itself. Maybe this does have sensing? I don't really know about that? Uh, let's bring in the hopp. What if I turn the light off. Let's do that and see what it does.

So I shall plug in the hoppy meter and I shall turn this light off and uh, I could uh take the exposure off. but I'm not going to because otherwise it's going to be dazzling going to plug it in. No, it just let up fuel brightness and it's showing 9.9 Watts H I wonder. And it I did notice its behavior before it would uh and now it's dimmed down to half intensity.

It's dimmed down to 4.6 watts and now it's gone out. Why does this have dusk sensing built in? I Guess we'll find out when we open it up. I'm going to turn this on again. No, it did.

Light Up Full intense again. I Don't know if there's any other sensing here. This is strange anyway, right? Uh, let's explore it. Watch your eyes.

the light is coming back. I mean it's been coming back quite a lot with this light. but here it is again. there we go.

The maximum I've had it at was about 16 wats just knocking stuff everywhere cuz this is quite a big bulky light. Yeah, I wonder what's going on there anyway? Uh, there is a connector in here to facilitate. uh, just who can Flex up with a uh simple connector but unfortunately it's marked live uh W neutral. uh but unfortunately the neutral is actually the Earth and inside.

well I'll take this cover off and show you so. uh I've already had this off because it has a threadlock on the screws and that was just making it ult bit of noise. so this comes off to reveal the gear tree effectively and the gear tree. The most notable things in here are the connector notice I'm just going to take this photo cell off the back.

There we go, notice that uh, it's marked live, neutral and Earth. In reality, if you look at the terminals here, the live is the only one that's right. the uh neutral is the next along and then the Earth and that's how it's marked. It's not actually marked in the the other connector that way.

It's kind of weird that they've done that. Um, we have these connectors in here going to the LED panel and we've got a little fuse um, surge suppressor and they make a thing about the fact that these units can be fairly easily serviced I Think what they mean by that is this panel can be removed. Let's remove the panel I Need to have a tidy up here. it's it's getting very cluttered so to remove the panel, you take out these four corner plates.

Me try and do this in a fairly controlled manner without scattering Hardware everywhere and once those uh brackets are removed, the light module itself has a cable going through a channel into the main body here and there is. there's the port for it. Uh, there is no heat sink compound under this, but it is a very thick aluminum plate. um, see the make a thing about this being service and easily changed.

but the easy removed terminals are the ones here that they've actually used at the factory so to speak. Uh, and the actual module is pushed into one-way trip connectors I Don't think these are going to come out, but you do have a couple Spar so you may have to cut them flush and actually uh, just push them in. So honestly I think the reason they say it's serviceable is purely so they can take the box of Eco I Don't think people would ser nous these because when you weigh in the the time Factor versus how someone just basically going up and planking and your light fitting on top if they really wanted to Ser The service these it would be worth taking them back to the workshop. But let's see if I can get the module out I'll take these screws out, is just going to fit in there.

Okay, let's uh, take that those out as well then because this is a little chassis plate or chass plate if you're in America that uh supports the connectors. So to be honest I think I'm going to have to cut those wires to get this out. I don't think I'm going to be able to release them from there right here. Well so be it.

I shall cut them then I notice the two connections. we've got gray and purple and they're going up to the Uh the socket here, so it is DED on the input to this. So let's cut these. Maybe not the official way to do it, but it's the way to do it.

Uh, right now I'll cut that one as well if I actually had a load of these to change I might consider um as an alternative to this actually using a little inline splice connectors for the new light and just maybe taking this out and cutting the wires but just leaving them inside and tucking them up where the other wiring is. Is this going to come out now? It has a bit of heat shrink sleeving on it for Extra Protection And here is our Modo don't know what that is. It's sticky right right now we're here. Oh I know what it is or is it.

This is where they've done their best to seal as much as possible because this anywhere that water can get into this that's a likely source of H failure because water does creep in. it gets in everywhere. I Tell you what. There are quite a lot of screws here, so I'll pause briefly while I undo them one moment please.

The screws are out. What is it going to show? That is quite a well packed circuit board? I Mean it's not super mega packed, but it's got a lot of specialist stuff on it, hasn't it? That is very intriguing. Interesting seal as well. The seal has a thermal pad in the back.

There's a thermal pad that's going to dissipate most of the heat into here. and what are these little black things for? Is that just for alignment or something else? Not really sure. Anyway, I shall take a little image of this and we can take a closer look one moment please and resume. And that one moment please was 4 hours long and I still don't have all the answers.

but I've got enough to show you what stuff does on here. The power supply has got me perplexed. Another thing I didn't mention the thing does come with the Indo glands, glands. Yeah, well seals.

and uh, when that's put in the main post mounting. hle What? I Mentioned earlier about the 76 millimeter, uh, post Top This is that 76 mm? So that answerers that. The circuit board itself is exquisite. It's really neat.

It's very much an integrated system. There's also a little coil in here. Is that visible there? It's not really visible here. There is an embedded coil in this, possibly for external programming, but the chip that's associated with it isn't actually on the board.

it's that little chip that's missing there. Um, I'm going to zoom down a bit here because uh, we want to get. we want to get more details in. So we got these clusters of chips LED chips.

And these appear to be multi-chip LEDs for high voltage. And they're not just all in series in these clusters. they're actually staggered. There's like four and four.

and also the LEDs are alternate on different and a different driver chip. That's these two chips here. the AC Rich 3 more about that later and uh, that correlates I Didn't realize this before. If you look at the lens system, the LEDs correlate to the pattern.

so you can actually theoretically choose via either programming in uh, from the factory presumably with these Uh program pins here, or possibly via the Uh the Del interface here. the digital interface, you can actually theoretically program the beam pattern of this. That is pretty clever, is it not very very interesting? The circuit board is not an aluminium core circuit board, which is surprising. and it may be multi-layer because it is complex and believe or not there are plated through holes but you can't see them because they're kind of full plated through holes and each of these LEDs has a th going out from it that couples uh through plated through holes onto the other side and then you look at what that was on.

let me just grabb it that all in plate. it has this thermal coupling pad to then take that heat those little black Uh studs. they were just for alignment of the thermal pad. It's a complex system.

it really is very professional. Very intriguing right? So let's explore the components. So the main Supply comes on here. uh and it goes through the 5 amp time delay fuse and the first thing it does is it not just goes to this bridge rectifier and gets converted from the AC to DC but UNS smooth DC But it also has these three components.

these are metal oxide ver. Then a power supply is generated for a Pic microcontroller. Now this power supply must be two voltage because the P Micr control is going to be running at 5 volts 3.3 volts. not sure but it is controlling the AC Rich chips.

These are dedicated LED drivers. Um, but it's controlling with an not 10vt signal which is kind of oldfashioned but very still very valid. This mosfet. Here there's two mosfets.

this one. I wonder I Initially I thought this might be what they call a switch capacitor Buck regulator. but I'm wondering if this one is actually a protection mosfet to protect against erroneous Uh voltage issues cuz it also feeds over to these two transient suppressors. Lots of transient suppression because, well.

Street Lighting: It's a very electrically noisy environment, particularly when you put an LED fixture on a run with uh, lots of metal helide High Press sodium low pressure sodium. They got high voltage spikes and things going on. You have to protect the electronic circuitry. It' be ideal if everything was just LED but you can't be allow for that.

so they include these extra components just for that extra protection. This mosfet, rather suspicious, gets quite hot about 45 c. Um, and it's worth mentioning that on standby unlit, this panel draws 2 wats. Now normally it would be switched by the Uh dusk sensor, but it doesn't have to because it turns out that the reason it wasn't performing as I expected is this is a little light sensor here and if I power this board up with directly uh and the light is on above the bench, it will go out.

um, it will fade out and uh, if I then turn the bench light off. Exactly 1 minute later it will gently fade back on Again, turn the light back on again, it has that delay of 1 minute and then it fades back off. So this is a light sensor and you might think, how does it know? how does it detect if it's lighting up itself? Well, that that you know it's dusk or whatever, or daylight. Well, the answer is because the way these LEDs are driven, they're actually going off.

Uh, in the case of UK 100 times a second, the case of America 120 times a second and it's obviously taking a little snapshot of the ambient light levels during that. But this doesn't mean there's flicker because of these. AC Rich Three chips. I Wonder if these are also from the same stable the LEDs because that they do seem to be a common paired thing.

And they do manufacture modules for the street ligh industry, but this is uh, made specifically in Du Lighting.com So if we take a look at one of those chips, we can see that it's got the four sets of LEDs that are fairly high voltage. They add up to pretty much the Main's voltage. Um, but they're actually staggered so that initially, um, when it's at the bottom end of the sine wave, when it approaches. in the case of UK probably about 60 volts, it starts turning this set of LEDs on and as the voltage increases, then it turns that leg off and it turns this one on and it basic.

Basically LEDs are s ramping up, but because they're actually spread evenly across the circuit board and mixed in amongst each other, you don't actually see that effect. Um, and what that means is that they can achieve extremely good Power factor I mean this thing is 0.9 power factor. Plus it's like I think it was 098 Power factor: Uh, it was really good Power factor which is just means it it runs. You can run a lot of fixtures in one cable without having to uh, derate the cable for inefficient power factors.

Um, but there is the Uh analog dim in input from the microcontroller. Interesting chips. DT 37a Was it? Hold on? Let me just. uh.

check that with a magnifying glass. These are the DT 37b variant. H What else is there to say about this? I Am perplexed at the power supply that is definitely getting warm. Is it a linear regulator or is it using switch capacitors I Don't see any I could see possibly this being used as Reservoir capacitor for the power supply.

Um, oh is that xener diode I didn't check that these little Uh chips down here not sure what they are. uh, they are labeled a9a I drew a blank on that for some reason I wondered initially I thought there might be uh, the digital. uh, maybe a level shift for the not 10 volt because the I don't think the microcontroller which is a P microcontroller can provide that directly. but that could just be using transistors for that uh conversion.

But let's take a look at the Del The Del is quite interesting. the digital Addressable Lighting interface. So this is a parp interface in the lighting industry down here and you can see it is optoisolated. It can actually it's got two Opto isolators because it can communicate backwards and forwards.

And if we take a look at the schematic of what's on here, which is a very standard Del configuration, we can see that the first thing it hits is a brid re fire. In the case of this unit, it's using two pairs of diodes in sort of the the So 23 type packages. little transistor packages. Um, and that's a transistor that's a xener diode and then three resistors and then two optimator.

That's all there is to that. But here is the secretary: The Del interface is a very slow protocol. It uh can only transmits a small number of commands per second. It's not like DMX.

But the upside of this is that because it's very slow and it uses very high voltage, both 16 volts Data Network Um, and a a very sort of low impedance. It's literally powering all these LEDs when it's active and when the processor wants to send data back, it just shunts out the network. But the idea of that is that you can use standard Mains wiring and you can run it in the same trunking and or uh cable Raceway containment and you don't have to worry, you just use standard Main's wiring for it and you don't have to worry. about the polarity because it is going through that bridge W far that so people can't mix up the network polarity and just they made it.

idiot proof. Basically so that converts the Del signal for 16 volts, 250 milliamps, uh to whichever polarity is it will correct it and it'll be plus roughly 15 or so volts and Zer volts. and as long as it's above uh 5.1 volts and plus the voltage to this diode that let's say this di is probably going to be 1.5 cuz it's probably infr red say 6.5 volts. As long as it's above that, that Led will light and that's the optic coupl LED that says that sends data into the process.

The little Pck microcontroller here. when the P microcontroller wants to send data back, it turns on its LED which is probably one of the highest current bits really in this circuitry cuz the P Micr is very low current device and those chips those uh AC Rich chips they just B basically use their own power. They are very, very interesting chips, but when the microcontroller wants to send data back onto the network, it pulses this uh, its LED and that literally turns on this transistor which shunts the network and uh, all the other devices they all their LEDs basically blink off and they can see that data is being transmitted and it means that you can have a big long run of uh, say you could have a common power source if this was a traditional building one, you could have loads of light fixtures along it. Plus you could have various keypads or you could have pass infrared detectors and they can be powered from that uh, 16 volt some of them if they're low current and they can put data onto it and say turn the lights on and then later on they can say turn the lights off um, but in this case it's just used purely between a more intelligent head than this, probably one with a a wireless network connection uh to actually do more interesting things.

Also, probably for programming this unit in the first place. Uh, very interesting. Anything else to say about this I think I've covered just about everything I'm going to start exploring that again see if that is a Xenor Diod? Certainly that was getting the hottest. Um I wonder if there are also possibly using no I'm not sure current through the rest of the circuitry to actually take some of the load off the power supply I Just didn't see a dedicated power supply chip around here I Saw things I know they sometimes hide as transistors.

these these days you get three pin chips that do just amazing things but I didn't couldn't tally up. Uh, this one is simply 330 and that came out out as a standard transistor and it's just you know, most of these things were not coming off in a search. To be honest, they were just drawing a blank on Google because they've used cryptic codes. Uh, just to because of the small space that can print in that H But there we have it.

the Indo light. Surprising. Uh, when it arrived I was expecting a separate driver inside I Wasn't expecting it to be on the circuit board, but uh, here it is. Everything is in the one board.

Mak It a very modular system. So yes, you can literally repair the fixture if it's commercially viable to do so by taking the whole module off this and connecting the 4 Wirs power and the Del network uh into the fixture. and then I I bring the fixture down from the pool for this. I wouldn't try up the pool uh, but you can then just refurbish the fixture almost completely at the same time.

I would change the uh. the transient suppressor on. Let me grab it. Nice machined aluminum casing.

Uh, this little fuse. uh, they wouldn't do it though, would they? The average person wouldn't change that, but I would cuz that's another layer of protection against transients. But here we have it. It's quite nice.

It's a chunky. it's a chunky thing. Very neat. Um, so that was well worth exploring.

I'm sorry I Couldn't go further I Would have loved to give you a schematic, but really, there are a lot of components on this board and it just wasn't viable. particularly when I'm struggling to actually Trace out uh, the power supply here, which was the main thing. but the real secret of the thing is the microcontroller, the Del Network and the AC Rich 3 uh dedicated uh control chips for the LEDs and the LEDs themselves. So all in all, it's a very well engineered device.