Poundland lights unexpected feature and USB mod.

after I'd made my 2018 Christmas lights from Poundland video a few of you can touch and said these strings of lights are also available in the warm wait and they are I've now got some notably the shop locally only at the one end a 120 LED sets the warm wait they didn't have the 50 LED sets maybe that's just because they're not gonna win yet not sure but they also mentioned that they've got a hidden feature and it's not mentioned anywhere in the box and I heard already discovered this myself the control system doesn't just flash mond off it also has a timer and that means it's got that facility that if you turn the LEDs on presumably either in the flashing mode or the standard mode it will automatically turn them off after see I don't know the exact time but I think it's going to turn them off after 6 hours and then turn them on again each Neuros later which means that if you turn them on let's see as I did 10 16 at night one night then theoretical turn off and say 4 o'clock in the morning but then they turn on again the following night at the same time and I thought that's quite interesting of which one of the circuit boards out and there is a position for a crystal on it but it's not used now this is interesting because I quite like these little tamed power supplies because it means that it's a battery life the lights come on for a fixed portion of time paranoid and it means that it's a basic of drupal's the battery life and last year was the year before I experimented I programmed a picnic controller wrote a bit of code that tries to do that but it was used in the internal RC oscillators built into these chips and it the drift was too much it drifted as battery voltage and temperature and it may have been a very small percentage drift but it was the difference between turning on at a correct time and turning progressively on later and later as the oscillators slowed down the battery voltage dropping so I thought these ones don't have a crystal so is that going to suffer the same fate so I turned these on at 10:16 yesterday and they've got nickel metal hydride cells which means the voltage is roundabout three point six volts and I monitored carefully kept them with me all the time to see what time they turned on and 1016 Kamath uh-oh they've not turned on and then at 1024 which is only 8 minutes later they did turn on so the drift is not actually that much 8 minutes is really quite acceptable it means that over the course of a week it's going to gradually drift up to an hour or more pitches starting to get a wee bit significant but at any time if you faint they're nocturnal on early enough you can turn them off and on again it'll restart the timing cycle it's just kind of it's a compromise to that so let's take a look at the circuit board the circuit board looks like this there's not much on it really there is not much I'll turn it rate way up that would be quite nice and this is the back of a circuit board I've not flipped the image over this time and also because there's not much on it this is glossy printer paper this is match printer paper you can see the difference here it does actually look this one has a deeper image this one is a more a lackluster image but some you might like that I don't know so it's got the classic 8 pin chip which I'm very suspicious as a wee GP maker controller because pin one in this instance is positive and pin 8 is negative this is really common these and likewise pins 2 & 3 are often used see and think Michael drawers think the big make of drawers the same as us they are being used for the position that would have been used for a crystal now I have a pen here yes I do have my pen here so normally in these and there is a position of the crystal in the back normally there'd be between these two parts they'd be a quartz crystal 32.7 6 8 kilohertz or 42 thousand seven hundred and sixty Hertz a few a few silver fir and likewise there have been two little capacitors here in fact that had been a row of three capacitors here one is a decoupling capacitor between the positive and negative supply rails and the other two would have been the Lord capacitors for the crystal to keep itself loaded down and oscillate in a cranked frequency and the reason they normally use a 32 point seven six eight kilohertz crystal is that if you divide that down in binary and I'm just just going to her I'm just gonna screw this up probably let's try this 1 plus sorry 2 x equals 4 8 16 32 64 128 so it's counting in binary 512 1024 32,768 it's a nice Brown binary figure that's why this crystal is always used in clocks because you can use binary counters to divide it down and it's notable that the polk maker controllers do have built in a facility to derive a 1 hertz time base internally from a thirty two point seven six eight kilohertz crystal that can optimize for ten things like this and that makes me wonder if this is one of these really cheap paducah maker controllers so what have I got here well not a large ground goes to that connection positive goes to that connection the switch toggles between two pins in this now which pins does it toggle between I didn't check that I think I should check that let's bear bring the meter in and check so let's say I put this on to continuity let's untangle the leads which I've turned into an unholy tangled mess okay so switches in the middle position let's see if we can trace where the switch leads are going to so this one is obvious this one is obviously going to this pin here I wonder if the other one is going to know it's not it's going to other unused pin so we get the two crystals this leads let's draw in this one is going up to there and the only other oddity in this chip all the other charges is at a 2 7 2 which is 2 7 and 2 zeros two thousand seven hundred ohm resister going to here why what's that for is that for calibration purposes I'm not sure the other thing is that the LEDs themself the straighter LEDs are connected one end is positive and the other end is connected to just directly two pins so it's just relying on them or MOSFET impedance on the little lab transistor inside on the chip to actually limit the current to the LEDs another interesting and really nice feature here is that they've brought the spring in from the battery pack it's soldered on to here but it also has a loop that goes around so when you screw this in with a screw it clamps that don't if you then sort of that after clamping that down I'm guessing that's what they do then it's going to make sure that all the stressors are taken off the solder joint when or maybe the I'm guessing they are doing their jig beforehand or they actually put it into the battery pack and then solder it there is there any clue when the battery pack that may have happened yes there is it's melted in the vicinity so they sorted it once it was in the battery pack interesting that's a clever thing that they've taken the string off that also anchors the circuit board in so that's all very clever features very nice so what I was going to say about these they are using the make chiller switch between flashing or static or off-time crystal right okay that's us cover just about everything but now some of you are seeing hope would convert these to run them off a USB supply instead of a battery well the way you do that is you turn the power off you take your pair of snips and you're just lot the leads off there let's say take the batteries out this no it's in interesting to note that the maker controllers powered all the time from the batteries regardless of which that's we that switches in certain me draw a small quiescent current probably negligible compared to normal operational current obviously air to hold those batteries out the way I'm going to turn the soldier on as well because let's convert this into a USB string of late another thing is worth noticing is a it's a 120 LEDs running on 50 milliamps because I emulated that I put my bench supply on instead of batteries and the current was approximately 50 milliamps through the whole lot so it's about half a million peach they're running out so let's improve on that to power them from a USB post plant so going to start by stripping these leads selects that strip the end off those and twist them this is where all that is super thin wire but that's not really uncommon it's also not twisting very well as this copper coated I mean I wonder don't know doesn't really matter it's a it's not a super dodgy high current thing the most important thing here is it should be easily soldered my sojourn is up to temperature you may hear it buzzing in the background when I speak some of you recently mentioned that you heard an artifact and noise in the background and the video it's because I have mentioned this before the camera I'm recording with has a noise gate in the microphone that I haven't worked out disabled a watch that means is a if the noise goes below a certain level it just cuts often perfect silence and then as soon as you speak again it brings audio back and there was a storm outside there is a storm again outside tonight it's always a storm Nayla man at this time yeah it's just the very nature of living in an island right so I'd like to do I like to get a red sharpie and I'm gonna get a lithium button cell this is the easiest way to check polarity plant the wires on they've lit if they didn't light it's the wrong polarity but they have lit and that means the one on the big say that's much positive is the positive cell run the sharp in that and that is them identified as the positive lead okay now we need a USB lead here is a typical USB lead that you might find in a typical USB purse player you get lost them you know everybody has these knocking around because they end up using their favorite USB lead and these just end up in a pile somewhere so I'm going to do is I'm going to chop this one in the middle for no good reason tell and we're going to nibble it and strip it so let's say leave ourselves plenty of room and I'm just going to nibble it around the snips trying not to cut the wire but by leaving a bit of slack there is that option if I do cut the wire it's not going to be too much running sure there's a pink core and a white core it seems logical that pink would positive and the weight we'd be negative but you can never assume anything because there it's not that uncommon for things like this to have the polarity reversed to what you might normally think so I'm going to do I'm going to twist these wires and they're going to put a little touch of salt on them again they're not twisting very well I'm seeing a common trend here of cheap water mmm let's say so do these make sure I'm soldiering the Craig side of the USB lead okay so now without letting these short I'm going to bring the bittern again I'm going to turn it to DC volts and I'm going to get a random USB power supply like this fetching pink one I'm going to plug it in making sure they don't short-circuit and I'm going to measure the voltage so I'm going to put the positive lead in the pink and the negative lead on the black and what I'm getting is a 5 volts it kind of why I was quite low there but the main thing is I the are not getting the negative symbol if I'd got the negative symbol like this oh yeah I'm not making a good connection you're at all am i or is that a power bank running flat no it's just made a bad connection so if I've got a negative symbol of priority would have been the wrong way around but because I'm putting the red lead on the pink and the black on the white and I'm getting 5 volts without the negative symbol it means the floret is cracked so the red is actually a positive social unplug that before I shorted out and I'm going to add some resistors in line because much as it would be nice to just basically slap this across LEDs that would be death to the LEDs so I've got a couple of resistors that I've already looped out and I've chosen two 10 ohm resistors to give a total of 20 ohms and so I'm going to get something to help me sort of this one moment where is it helping hands I rarely use them but in this instance they are quite useful so I'm going to grip the resistor the resistor color code markings are brown black black 1 0 0 where 1 0 and then 0 as a multiplier means that the resistor value is 10 ohms and I'm using 2 because it's just kind of easy to put one in each lead and it spreads the power dissipation across them and that's going to give a total of 20 ohms which rather conveniently works out very well because if it's a 5 volt supply and the LEDs the parallel circuit of LEDs is going to be typically about 3 volts it means there's 2 volts to drop 2 volts divided by 20 ohms is about 100 milliamps which is just absolutely perfect that's actually going to be twice but the current was before it's can be roughly at 1 milliampere LED it doesn't matter which we don't ease resistors go I'll just tin this lead again and bring this lead up put it on it and you can either put them together and air flow some soldierin or 10 the pre-tournament and then just reflow them together like that perfect right here now we're going to crop these down a bit again the lead just to the point that enough to solder onto and this is the important bit or remembering to put the heat shrink on if you forget to put the heat shrink on it's very very annoying you could kind of do it with tape afterwards I've got a couple of bits of heat shrink they're different lengths I'll crop them to the same lands just for cosmetic reasons it's just basically what I had and they're going to slip them over the LED leads because I there the longest no going to slide them right off out the way so they don't get Pshonka preshrunk accidentally I shall also crop these leads down to ten a little bit right so let's start off with positive and I show flood somesort on to that find the positive lead here with that red sharpie on it and I shall pretend the resistor it just helps things flow and I think I've just floor some children to this one again you can put some solder in both and then just remelt them together but in this instance I am just a flowing some sort of directly onto them and then the other resistor goes into the grips here and I get the other lead and let's just for the sake of variety just preload it with a good blob of solder a good blob of solder and both leads so there's plenty to flow into each other when I flew them together I've just dripped some solder onto the connector and then we'll just flow that that again and that's them soldered together no theoretical if I keep these apart I can check things are alright before I shrink this by making sure they're not touching anything I can plug it in and the LEDs light nice and brightly so now I'm going to put the heat shrink over so I'm going to slide it back down the center on the resistors and then get the heat gun or you could use it later the heat gun is just not actually activated that's a bit disturbing if I switch that off accidentally yes I have okay so here's the heat gun and I'm just gonna float that heat shrink and just gently melt it on perfect and then get the lever to heat shrink slide it down over its resistor and melt it too and for those of wondering this breathtakingly quiet little heat gun is part of the soldering station it's a Yahoo r87 860 a cheap and cheerful Chinese one the only condition being if you buy one double check everything is correct and say there are thin wires and things like that so that's that done I'm going to take exposure off I'm gonna find that little power supply I'm gonna plug it in and know if I take exposure off here until the lights off there are a lot brighter than before actually that's quite nice they're looking slightly ferocious yellow in the video but they're actually quite a soft pinkish white to me and now they're being powered off a USB purse plan and at 100 milliamps that is going to run those LEDs for a good length of time so I'd say that's a good result so the LED lights do have that timer built-in that's a useful feature to know but you can also adapt them both the the all warm white ones are the colored ones to run off USB with just two 10 ohm resistors and a sawn-off USB lead so that's quite a good result

Channel: bigclivedotcom

Views: 93,128

Rating: 4.9295979 out of 5

Keywords: poundland, usb, led, fairy, christmas, lights, modification, hack, mod, powerbank, power bank, resistor, timer, battery

Id: gJKy20wfIvg

Length: 18min 47sec (1127 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 16 2018