QS sent me a link to a series of Youtube videos of xmas LED light reviews. This review is on my mind right now. It’s a review and teardown of a 15 RGB LED light string from Brite Star. This is in my opinion an excessively long video at 55 minutes. I think it would have been better if he gave the synopsis at the beginning and then advised the viewer that he could skip the technical details. Or else he could have broken it up into more than one video. For those pressed for time, they can skip to the 50 minute point and get a synopsis. We’re all pressed for time, what with family, work and time spent on day-to-day necessities, so it’s hard to justify spending a whole hour of one’s time watching a review of a single product.
For a xmas LED light string it’s quite complicated. He opens up and shows the ‘photocoupler’ (their term for optocisolator) and controller. At 23 minutes it gets more interesting as he tears down the controller and comments on the design of the packaging. This light string uses a COB (chip on board) on the controller, the photocoupler and each LED light – which to me adds a lot to the complexity.
Fortunately all of this is assembled with screws so it could be repairable and hackable by those so inclined. From what I saw, the photocoupler allows a series of strings to be daisychained together, and the photocoupler allows one controller, presumably the first in the line, to control the whole string. To me, this photocoupler opens up a lot of possibilities. If the signals coming out of it are not unique to this light and are standard enough to be readable by other devices, then it could be connected to an external system and be used to control other things. Or looking at it the other way, if the strings accept data that is a standard format, then other devices could be used to control the strings.
It’s kind of surprising how many microcontrollers have popped up in all sorts of places, such as appliances, equipment, and portable devices. Another thing that has happened without most people knowing it is the number of microcontrollers that are used in vehicles.
Aside – In the video I saw his Fluke 87 V DMM, and later googled it. I came across this web page where you can buy one for a hundred million dollars!!! Well, maybe it’s actually cheaper than that.
Back to experimenting…