For purposes of entertainment and another video, make them send you another 4 metres. They may try to give you a refund of 10p, lets go for the full 5 metres. Cheers
Writing to these Chinese sellers usually takes a day to get a response but I've found they value their 100% rating very much and don't quibble over tiny orders. Almost always a partial or full refund depending on the issue and what you ask for. I just got a refund on a $35 item because they didn't have a replacement power supply for the ozone generator I bought. Always say something.
@@DCBpower i bought a tiny camera that'd be easy to carry around, turns out the battery was cut up on the inside. I asked about where I could get a battery, they said I couldn't get one and just gave me a refund.
the vast majority of chinese electronics sellers Ive dealt with on ebay are fine and running honest businesses. Ive had maybe 2 or 3 things (out of hundreds) that seemed intentionally described wrongly. there are scams ofc, lithium batteries and power banks with wildly exaggerated capacities etc, but theyre obvious enough to just not order in the first place. but theres a lot of people who will order "too good to be true" type stuff from sellers with awful feedback, be surprised that they get sent rubbish and then assume other sellers must all be the same
I found an item I was after on eBay but the price was too good to be true so I purchased it knowing that I had done my doe. Was very cheap hence the gamble. I received said item and lo and behold........it didn't work as stated. I emailed the seller, told him he was selling dodgy goods which he should remove and that I didn't want a refund because I gambled and lost. The seller replied offering a 25 or 30% discount and I responded with the gambling..lost line and was then offered a 50% discount. After 6 of these emails I stopped replying. However some people play eBay Gambling and win but my luck does not run in that direction. Good luck to you who do win though.
You should really make this into its own series. There are tons of shady and cheap electronics on eBay. it's very interesting seeing what you get compared to what was listed. Interesting content with minimal cost.
Hi Warm the end of the tubing with your heat shrink gun then you can easily push pins/wires into the plastic tubing. Also, when putting the tubing onto wire frames warm it; we use incandescent lamps in our rope light and to warm it, all that is necessary is to light it up but with LEDS you might shine an incandescent flood light on the rope then bend it to shape. Have a Great New Year!!!!!
Having spent over 20 years working with tubelight on municipal lights I know of these tricks. But also to make sure the tungsten tubelight is off when pulling it through frames as it is more vulnerable to lamp failure while hot. For the LED tubelight I put it in a box with a fan heater blowing into it to soften it for putting on a frame.
Hopefully I didn't come across as being rude. I had the joy of working with many kilometers of tubelight in a very cold warehouse which didn't really help much, so we did use heat guns for softening plastic, and pulling the full length off the drum onto the floor and running it for a while definitely helped soften it up. The LED stuff has resistors along its length that does soften it a bit too, but it takes longer to warm up. I'll be looking at the LED version of the tubelight in a video soon and will cover the terminations and what's inside.
I'm suddenly curious, when you order these things on Ebay and the like, do you give feedback on these sellers? Particularly the ones selling dangerous stuff? It's hard to make a difference as one buyer on the listings, but negative feedback goes a long way on ebay.
So clive, do you recommend kits for beginners or do you suggest they just mess around with components and cheap broken stuff to learn soldering and assembly?
Just make sure you're safe; experiment with low-voltage stuff first. That can also go up in smoke if handled improperly, but won't electrocute you in the process.
Somebody recently explained the $1 listings to me.. In China, people get paid a subsidy to dispose of sub-standard goods and other waste. They also get a special subsidised export postal rate to pay for export of goods. So they combine the two and make money, mostly on the waste disposal side.
Still Saturday, haven't found my POPEYE DVD yet, so I am still on my Big Clive watching binge. Those lights look so very familiar , being an RV user, and a nomad at heart, many of the newer Class A motor homes have those type of LED lights below the awnings all the way down the side of the rigs. At night that glow is just amazing on a dark night in the deserts of Arizona, the blue glow is one of my favorite colors, in fact when we stayed in our sticks and bricks home over the winter, I would hang large sets of blue lights all around the house, and decorate the trees and such with strings of all blue lights. I recall as a boy, dad would drive us around town once a year, when we went in for our yearly movie show visit, around Christmas time, and the houses with that blue glow amazed me then, and still does today. Ah the 1950's Christmas Lights, now that was when they still built the lights right, big and bright, and so very blue....
I love regular tube lights, but hate the repairability of them. I have an old tube light that only part of it works (short in part of the length) with no way to fix without cutting.
I cringed as you twisted the aluminum wires onto the full-bridge rectifier. Also, would you put a capacitor in parallel to get rid of the flicker, or is it only noticeable with a camera?
My friend had similar leds with just a little rectifier, and they flickered really bad. Would recommend putting a capacitor on there to smooth it out a little bit.
So Chinese sellers have their own definition of Metre to go with their unique definition of mAh - both 20% or less than the values used in the rest of the world.
Chin has a 'different' culture. They have 1.3 billion people, most of whom are hyper-competing to get a slice of wealth in the mayhem that is the Chinese move to become a 1st world country. It can be toxic at times. Total national assets / population = material quality of life.
Hi Clive, don't know if you do teardown requests but I'm interested to see what's inside one of those Smart Power cords where some of the outlets are controlled by whether what's plugged into the control outlet is drawing current or not.
I never noticed that you missed a day. Doesn't matter, I have never looked forward to youtubing after work as much as this year.. well done mate, and all the best for 2017.
I used to do a lot of testing in environmental chambers with heat shrink. The regular heat shrink tubing is not intended to be used in an exterior environment where it might be exposed to moisture. In some cases it is actually worse than nothing because it will actually allow moisture to wick up inside through capillary action and then remain there keeping everything permanently wet. There is however, adhesive line heat shrink tubing (which is essentially hot melt glue) that is incredibly good at sealing those connections. As you heat the tubing, the adhesive also melts and seals everything nice and tight.
I use construction nails for terminal spikes, they're cheap, come in all sizes and the head of the nail also works well as a connection point for a wire.
When you use diodes to convert the Ac power to Dc does it have the same characteristics as DC from a battery? And is using one better on equipment than the other?
Could you have a look at the Nival Travel Laundry thinger and tell us if you think it would actually be safe to use? I'm really curious about it, but also, I'd like to not die washing my delicates in the sink like an idiot. :)
Seems to me that I remember somewhere on ebay was "Item not as described", I'd go for that if I were you. What came to me when you found that you couldn't solder to those wires was to use one of those terminal strips where you insert the wire and clamp down on it with a screw...
Your comment about the color being wrong for that wire - I was fixing a solar lamp recently and discovered that the wires used on the neutral terminal were pitch black. Seemed to take solder just fine though.
Clever bloke, I feel that future generations of people are slowly devolving as technology becomes easier to access and easier to use. Some individuals are very clever of course but I feel like mass populus lack basic Maths, English and Science. To be perfectly honest I also learnt a whole lot more once I left school.
People keep saying that as if the last few millennia of human history haven't been much the same. No one's "devolving", everything just remains essentially the same.
Domino52o you realize they completely changed the way IQ scores were calculated a few decades ago, eh? And raw scores for most populations have been steadily rising since then?
I love the Molex connector idea. I would go as far as to putting a dab of adhesive under the little flap of plastic and the cable's insulation and have myself a permanently attached connector. Even think about devising a male-female standard with molex and have a junction point on every piece of lighting strip.
7:10 sometimes you get yourself with one ! 🔪 I usually wait a few seconds after a clean slice thinking *did I? Did I just? is it going to hurt? Aaahh yes there’s the blood* 😖
Also threatening them with negative rating makes them bend double to please you - I think they're under threat of losing their overseas posting if they get (too many!) negative ratings!
I saw that you spent a lot of effort to rectify the input to the tape. Do you actually have to rectify the current? After all, LEDs are rectifiers and they would rectify the current to DC.
Jim MacLaughlin Almost 2yrs later, I know. I had the same thought. A full bridge rectifier would double the power. Question remains whether or not the leds could handle the ‘negative’ voltage.
I bought this exact stuff in cold white listed as 240v. I think they've missed the 0 off the listing you bought it from. I wasn't expecting unterminated ends, but to be fair the listing didn't say it was terminated. Must be a different manufacturer though as mine soldered no bother.
A lot of it, I think, is to do with mains frequency. The LEDs are flickering at 100Hz, twice the 50Hz mains frequency. Presumably the camera is scanning at a frequency close to that, so sometimes it catches the LED in the on state, sometimes in the off. Human eyes smear light together over time. Digital cameras take a snapshot of an instant, then spend the next fraction of a second sending the picture out to the controller. So flicker gets exaggerated, especially in RUclips videos shot at 24 or 30Hz. So if you were filming motion video with a high speed camera, you'd still get the flicker.
Clive is a wonder. When I have the urge to splurge on aBay electronics I just remember Clive and watch a Clive vid instead until the urge passes. Sometimes it takes several Clive vids until urge dissipates. Congrats on the Bigclivedotcom channel and 200k.
While Molex, and everyone's dog do make (Berg) header pin connectors, Molex type connectors are the other connector in PCs. The fatter bullet style ones. Like the once common 4 pin power connector. ATX motherboard power connectors are still Molex type too. Just a minor detail.
Congrats on 200k subscribers! :))) With today's abundance of "fake" wires it's good to have the special solder for aluminium. The flux is very corrosive to iron-clad copper soldering iron tips, so it's good to have a separate iron for that purpose. All the best in 2017! :)
Even though these are cheap, I hope you reem these guys via ebay to help stop the seller from stealing over and over and over. It adds up for them. If not, it allows them to continue throwing more and more junk out to the world and more over to those of us that are not smart enough to catch them and/or those of us that may miss out on one of your very nicely done and informative clips. Thanks, Semper Fi
You can solder aluminum with pure tin solder, which can be bought as lead free solder. You abrade the aluminum with a medium grit sandpaper and immediately apply a bit of motor oil to it, and then heat it up with a small torch or heat gun and apply the tin solder immediately before the oil evaporates or burns. It is not easy, but it sure works in a pinch.
greenaum Yep. That is the main reason that soldering and welding aluminum is so hard. Also aluminum won't take lead solder no matter how clean it is, i don't know why.
ELECTRONTHORP2 Yes, you could do that too. I've refined my technique a bit, and I've gone to using a coarse file and vaccum pump oil, and then heating it up very hot and spreading a bit of molten solder about on the surface with a steel implement, which causes the tin to make a low melting alloy with the aluminum. That causes the aluminum to be very nicely tinned.
I was cringing at 13:41 because I thought you were touching both the pins as you jammed the molex connector into the strip that was live at rectified mains voltage. Even after realizing that was not the live strip, I still cringed again when you bridged the pins with the pliers. I am glad to be wrong; fried Clive does not sound like a good dish.
I just dug up the listing for these (Lot no. ends xx3648, right?) as I was expecting it to be one of those listings full of dodgy small-print, but - Rather tacky store presentation aside - I couldn't see anything like that. Pretty clear the seller knows less about what (s)he's selling than I do about what (s)he's selling! :-o :-p Still...Given you appear to have been the first on the listing to have bought these, I have to admire your courage! If these were advertised for mains voltage (And let's face it, the seller could easily have missed a zero when typing "240v") I wouldn't want to touch them with a barge pole! :-p Still, I'm curious: Split up into sections, do you reckon these'd be good for *low* voltage applications like PC case lighting? :-)
I recently got an IR camera and small monitor; both had bits and pieces of electronics in them, but neither were wired up; the camera was wired up enough that the lights turned on, but neither worked at the voltage described; which was 12 v...
I like to think that someone, somewhere has received their 1M of 240V LED strips, only for it to be very long, and explosive when plugged in.
I love how a simple work-around becomes more dodgy with each step of the process.
For purposes of entertainment and another video, make them send you another 4 metres. They may try to give you a refund of 10p, lets go for the full 5 metres. Cheers
Writing to these Chinese sellers usually takes a day to get a response but I've found they value their 100% rating very much and don't quibble over tiny orders. Almost always a partial or full refund depending on the issue and what you ask for. I just got a refund on a $35 item because they didn't have a replacement power supply for the ozone generator I bought. Always say something.
@@DCBpower i bought a tiny camera that'd be easy to carry around, turns out the battery was cut up on the inside. I asked about where I could get a battery, they said I couldn't get one and just gave me a refund.
So in China 5m means 1m?
A big part is, but not all yeah.
I've bought some "legit" stuff from China.
it's not all like that. it just happens because they sell thousands of different things. mistakes/scam happen.
They might tell you their dicks are 5 inches, you get the real 1.
the vast majority of chinese electronics sellers Ive dealt with on ebay are fine and running honest businesses. Ive had maybe 2 or 3 things (out of hundreds) that seemed intentionally described wrongly. there are scams ofc, lithium batteries and power banks with wildly exaggerated capacities etc, but theyre obvious enough to just not order in the first place. but theres a lot of people who will order "too good to be true" type stuff from sellers with awful feedback, be surprised that they get sent rubbish and then assume other sellers must all be the same
that is why i never buy on ebay i get my thing from gear bst or banggood its cheaper and i get what i order
Ebay gambling should be a "thing"
TheRealMrPooPyNuTz
Nice name
It is.
I found an item I was after on eBay but the price was too good to be true so I purchased it knowing that I had done my doe. Was very cheap hence the gamble. I received said item and lo and behold........it didn't work as stated. I emailed the seller, told him he was selling dodgy goods which he should remove and that I didn't want a refund because I gambled and lost. The seller replied offering a 25 or 30% discount and I responded with the gambling..lost line and was then offered a 50% discount. After 6 of these emails I stopped replying. However some people play eBay Gambling and win but my luck does not run in that direction. Good luck to you who do win though.
Absolutely. $1.5 US and the EBay server selects a random product from the "General" category:-)
If you want peak ebay gambling, you gotta buy the mystery boxes.
You should really make this into its own series. There are tons of shady and cheap electronics on eBay. it's very interesting seeing what you get compared to what was listed. Interesting content with minimal cost.
"I'm going to try shoving it up." "I could have done with a bit more length there."
I see Clive's New Year's resolutions didn't last long.
I liked the "Careless Whisker" too.
George Michael would have been proud.
😅 😂 🤣
Congrats on 200k and happy new year
Nice George Michael tribute.
"Careless Whiskers"
Mc Atheist I noticed that too.I wonder if it was deliberate.I hope so!
Mc Atheist He mentioned it in the last video i think why they are called like that
Stayshtum68 watch his Q&A videos
It's a common term in the business, othrwise known as a george michael. It's not because he just died, it's been around for as long as I can remember.
Nice to see someone else that can use their 2 hands as 4 hands when it comes to soldering. Slightly different from how I do it, but still...
I came down to comment on the skilled dexterity. Well done.
Ima Tumor
The other secret to good soldering is knowing exactly how much something is going to hurt before it actually burns you.
@@htomerif haha this is a slow burn
No need for a third hand when you have ten fingers!
Welcome to hydraulic LED channel.
*The careless whisker of a good friend*
Smartwatch & Gadget Unboxings by Dr Jake I'm rather pleased I wasn't the only twit who thought this :)
Otherwise known as the "George Michael". Explained in the previous video.
Hello there
I love the randomness, yet always satisfying content.
Hi Warm the end of the tubing with your heat shrink gun then you can easily push pins/wires into the plastic tubing. Also, when putting the tubing onto wire frames warm it; we use incandescent lamps in our rope light and to warm it, all that is necessary is to light it up but with LEDS you might shine an incandescent flood light on the rope then bend it to shape.
Have a Great New Year!!!!!
Having spent over 20 years working with tubelight on municipal lights I know of these tricks. But also to make sure the tungsten tubelight is off when pulling it through frames as it is more vulnerable to lamp failure while hot. For the LED tubelight I put it in a box with a fan heater blowing into it to soften it for putting on a frame.
Hopefully I didn't come across as being rude. I had the joy of working with many kilometers of tubelight in a very cold warehouse which didn't really help much, so we did use heat guns for softening plastic, and pulling the full length off the drum onto the floor and running it for a while definitely helped soften it up. The LED stuff has resistors along its length that does soften it a bit too, but it takes longer to warm up. I'll be looking at the LED version of the tubelight in a video soon and will cover the terminations and what's inside.
You were not rude. Or agitated. MT LM is being a douche.
I'm suddenly curious, when you order these things on Ebay and the like, do you give feedback on these sellers? Particularly the ones selling dangerous stuff? It's hard to make a difference as one buyer on the listings, but negative feedback goes a long way on ebay.
Aha, another pilot among BC's viewers. I've spotted several profile pics with DCs on! :-) I should update mine to get some sort of club together....
So clive, do you recommend kits for beginners or do you suggest they just mess around with components and cheap broken stuff to learn soldering and assembly?
Both. Just plough in and start playing.
Just make sure you're safe; experiment with low-voltage stuff first. That can also go up in smoke if handled improperly, but won't electrocute you in the process.
So stay away from beefy capacitors and mains voltage, got it. Gonna start with some small usb tat and see what happens.
My new favourite channel can't stop watching these.
Somebody recently explained the $1 listings to me.. In China, people get paid a subsidy to dispose of sub-standard goods and other waste. They also get a special subsidised export postal rate to pay for export of goods. So they combine the two and make money, mostly on the waste disposal side.
Clive when you've discovered something is not as described on ebay or positively dodgy, do you report it?
I wondered this, especially the gay dalek lights which he mentioned were potentially fatal.
Happy New Year.
Crimp if you can't solder. No ferules handy?
Or use chocolate block
Congratulations on reaching 200k subscribers Clive. Great start to the New Year.
Still Saturday, haven't found my POPEYE DVD yet, so I am still on my Big Clive watching binge. Those lights look so very familiar , being an RV user, and a nomad at heart, many of the newer Class A motor homes have those type of LED lights below the awnings all the way down the side of the rigs. At night that glow is just amazing on a dark night in the deserts of Arizona, the blue glow is one of my favorite colors, in fact when we stayed in our sticks and bricks home over the winter, I would hang large sets of blue lights all around the house, and decorate the trees and such with strings of all blue lights. I recall as a boy, dad would drive us around town once a year, when we went in for our yearly movie show visit, around Christmas time, and the houses with that blue glow amazed me then, and still does today. Ah the 1950's Christmas Lights, now that was when they still built the lights right, big and bright, and so very blue....
I love regular tube lights, but hate the repairability of them. I have an old tube light that only part of it works (short in part of the length) with no way to fix without cutting.
8:09 "whats the worst could happen" You're like the "Bob Ross" of electronics.
I cringed as you twisted the aluminum wires onto the full-bridge rectifier. Also, would you put a capacitor in parallel to get rid of the flicker, or is it only noticeable with a camera?
It's not really visible to the eye.
The flicker, although not visible to the eye, does give me headaches. Lucky you if you aren't afflicted with such a thing.
My friend had similar leds with just a little rectifier, and they flickered really bad. Would recommend putting a capacitor on there to smooth it out a little bit.
24vdc, 240vac, maybe the seller thought it was the same stuff, just dropped the zero?? Thanks Clive
It's 240V DC. But also 5 metres became 1 metre. And the picture changed...
Happy new year Clive and congradulations on reaching 200,000 subscribers.
Congratulations on 200,000 subscribers!
Its always fun learning from this channel. Nice work!
I'm reminded of a recent video about the "30v" wire in the magnet mount sewing machine lamp... this 240v strip is right in that vein.
So Chinese sellers have their own definition of Metre to go with their unique definition of mAh - both 20% or less than the values used in the rest of the world.
Chin has a 'different' culture.
They have 1.3 billion people, most of whom are hyper-competing to get a slice of wealth in the mayhem that is the Chinese move to become a 1st world country.
It can be toxic at times. Total national assets / population = material quality of life.
Well you use your own spelling of meter so why not.
A big chunk of the English-speaking world could get upset if he claimed the spelling as his own, just saying.
@@IRMacGuyver tbf if they are measuring in meters instead of metres it would explain the problem.
Does the lighter trick work? Hit the wire with some flame for a couple of seconds to burn off the coating, then try to solder.
Hi Clive, don't know if you do teardown requests but I'm interested to see what's inside one of those Smart Power cords where some of the outlets are controlled by whether what's plugged into the control outlet is drawing current or not.
Have you done any reviews on soldering irons? Most of them I have don't get hot enough in colder weather to do anything.
Yep, he did a couple on the cheap ones he use.
Happy New Year & Congrats On 200,000 Subs!
happy new year clive, also thanks for the BEST series of advent videos leading up to christmas and into the new year.
I think I only managed to miss a single day of my December burst of videos.
I never noticed that you missed a day. Doesn't matter, I have never looked forward to youtubing after work as much as this year.. well done mate, and all the best for 2017.
You are a genius... props for making this video! Way to go man, I wish I had a mind that worked like yours does
going into 2017 with 200K subs, congrats Clive.
Hi Clive, wondering if your getting involved with the new satellite ground station that's due to be built on the Isle of Man? Sounds like your bag!
Brilliant, great soldering skills and holding rectifiers and solder and iron at the same time.
Congrats 200k and happpy new year clive. Keep up the good work.
I have no idea why I am watching this but your voice is hypnotizing me...
I used to do a lot of testing in environmental chambers with heat shrink. The regular heat shrink tubing is not intended to be used in an exterior environment where it might be exposed to moisture. In some cases it is actually worse than nothing because it will actually allow moisture to wick up inside through capillary action and then remain there keeping everything permanently wet. There is however, adhesive line heat shrink tubing (which is essentially hot melt glue) that is incredibly good at sealing those connections. As you heat the tubing, the adhesive also melts and seals everything nice and tight.
I use construction nails for terminal spikes, they're cheap, come in all sizes and the head of the nail also works well as a connection point for a wire.
Happy New Year! And CONGRATULATIONS on 200k subs!
When you use diodes to convert the Ac power to Dc does it have the same characteristics as DC from a battery? And is using one better on equipment than the other?
Could you have a look at the Nival Travel Laundry thinger and tell us if you think it would actually be safe to use? I'm really curious about it, but also, I'd like to not die washing my delicates in the sink like an idiot. :)
It's a bit like throwing a vibrator in the sink with your laundry. I'm not convinced it will have much of an effect.
seen a vid of it ,dont work ,it bollocks
do it yourself ,you scab
Brilliant hack Clive. Those 4 pin Molex connectors can be stripped from old 3.5" floppy drives.
Seems to me that I remember somewhere on ebay was "Item not as described", I'd go for that if I were you. What came to me when you found that you couldn't solder to those wires was to use one of those terminal strips where you insert the wire and clamp down on it with a screw...
Your comment about the color being wrong for that wire - I was fixing a solar lamp recently and discovered that the wires used on the neutral terminal were pitch black. Seemed to take solder just fine though.
The black may have been surface corrosion if it had been submerged. Sometimes you have to scrape the surface to solder or connect reliably.
The best I could tell it was completely clean. It was also in 2 layers of insulation. If I find some more I'll send you a picture.
the wires are probably CCA (copper clad aluminium), so that's why you can't solder them (without special stuff)
"What's the worst that could happen?" Famous last words.
Dr Pepper
Clever bloke, I feel that future generations of people are slowly devolving as technology becomes easier to access and easier to use. Some individuals are very clever of course but I feel like mass populus lack basic Maths, English and Science. To be perfectly honest I also learnt a whole lot more once I left school.
I was the school dunce. Bottom of the class every time. Then I started my apprenticeship and swept the board of awards.
Likewise.
I failed every grade from 1st to 10th when i got expelled. Went and took my GED a year later and passed with a solid B average
People keep saying that as if the last few millennia of human history haven't been much the same. No one's "devolving", everything just remains essentially the same.
Marshal Walker
It's already been proven friend that iq's were something like ten points higher on average just 50 to 60 years ago
Domino52o you realize they completely changed the way IQ scores were calculated a few decades ago, eh? And raw scores for most populations have been steadily rising since then?
You are fearless, Clive. That is One of the things we love about you.
Congrats on 200k for the new year Clive! :D
Clive proceeds to shove it up the end. It's resisting. It isn't happy... ...It's going in, Oh, it's not. >_>
Clive do you ever report these items to ebay for being incorrectly advertised / dangerous?
I love the Molex connector idea. I would go as far as to putting a dab of adhesive under the little flap of plastic and the cable's insulation and have myself a permanently attached connector. Even think about devising a male-female standard with molex and have a junction point on every piece of lighting strip.
7:10 sometimes you get yourself with one ! 🔪
I usually wait a few seconds after a clean slice thinking *did I? Did I just? is it going to hurt? Aaahh yes there’s the blood* 😖
I hope you gave the seller a negative rating.
Gooberslot its better to ask for a refund
Also threatening them with negative rating makes them bend double to please you - I think they're under threat of losing their overseas posting if they get (too many!) negative ratings!
Me whenever I build hobby projects: "Bleh, a real electrician probably wouldn't twist wires like that."
A real electrician:
"It may arc on that connection because its not very good. oh well" ha love it.
I saw that you spent a lot of effort to rectify the input to the tape. Do you actually have to rectify the current? After all, LEDs are rectifiers and they would rectify the current to DC.
Jim MacLaughlin
Almost 2yrs later, I know.
I had the same thought. A full bridge rectifier would double the power. Question remains whether or not the leds could handle the ‘negative’ voltage.
could you crimp some of those little brass thingies onto the aluminium wires and then solder onto that?
I bought this exact stuff in cold white listed as 240v. I think they've missed the 0 off the listing you bought it from. I wasn't expecting unterminated ends, but to be fair the listing didn't say it was terminated. Must be a different manufacturer though as mine soldered no bother.
Tap connectors might work. Scotchlock 558 or something similar.
I've always wondered: If you film LED's on a high speed camera would you see the "flickering" still?
A lot of it, I think, is to do with mains frequency. The LEDs are flickering at 100Hz, twice the 50Hz mains frequency. Presumably the camera is scanning at a frequency close to that, so sometimes it catches the LED in the on state, sometimes in the off.
Human eyes smear light together over time. Digital cameras take a snapshot of an instant, then spend the next fraction of a second sending the picture out to the controller. So flicker gets exaggerated, especially in RUclips videos shot at 24 or 30Hz.
So if you were filming motion video with a high speed camera, you'd still get the flicker.
Happy New Year Clive, looking forward to more videos in the new year! :D
Soooo, that's what's in the blob on the power cord. Question, Why? Why feed a diode with AC to feed another diode with DC?
The LED strip requires DC as the LEDs are not designed to withstand a high reverse voltage. It also means they light on both halves of the sinewave.
Cheers Clive, hadn't even thought about that.
Throw a cap in parallel on the rectified side, that flicker :O
I think you can actually solder to aluminium, you just have to do it under a drop of motor oil.
great stuff as always but can't help thinking somewhere in the south of England John Ward is having a heart attack watching this 😂
Surprised you don't seem to use those strips of connector blocks for this type of connection. Cheap and they'll hold anything you can get in the hole.
always the best commentary during your videos
Clive is a wonder. When I have the urge to splurge on aBay electronics I just remember Clive and watch a Clive vid instead until the urge passes. Sometimes it takes several Clive vids until urge dissipates. Congrats on the Bigclivedotcom channel and 200k.
While Molex, and everyone's dog do make (Berg) header pin connectors, Molex type connectors are the other connector in PCs. The fatter bullet style ones. Like the once common 4 pin power connector. ATX motherboard power connectors are still Molex type too. Just a minor detail.
Those were the Molex KK Series that clive was using.
Dave Pusey
They're called Berg connectors. But whatever.
As I have Aspergers, I have many autistic tendency’s. My obsessions let to a good creare, so all is good here.
I think most people with high functioning Asperger's end up with good careers. They're born to be technical experts.
Also those with ADHD.
Clive, you could have used a small screw terminal block to connect the aluminium wires. Or test probe hooks. Or even small croc clips.
I always think you'll end up stabbing your hand or burning yourself the way you work. Scares me everytimes haha. Good videos great channel BigClive !
Congrats on 200k subscribers! :)))
With today's abundance of "fake" wires it's good to have the special solder for aluminium. The flux is very corrosive to iron-clad copper soldering iron tips, so it's good to have a separate iron for that purpose. All the best in 2017! :)
Even though these are cheap, I hope you reem these guys via ebay to help stop the seller from stealing over and over and over. It adds up for them. If not, it allows them to continue throwing more and more junk out to the world and more over to those of us that are not smart enough to catch them and/or those of us that may miss out on one of your very nicely done and informative clips. Thanks, Semper Fi
Happy New Year! or as the old man says "Crap in Yer Ear!"
Wim Widdershins "Eh.. What? What? .. Grab me a beer? Yes, please do."
You can solder aluminum with pure tin solder, which can be bought as lead free solder. You abrade the aluminum with a medium grit sandpaper and immediately apply a bit of motor oil to it, and then heat it up with a small torch or heat gun and apply the tin solder immediately before the oil evaporates or burns. It is not easy, but it sure works in a pinch.
Something to do with aluminium forming an oxide coating whenever it hits air?
greenaum Yep. That is the main reason that soldering and welding aluminum is so hard. Also aluminum won't take lead solder no matter how clean it is, i don't know why.
ELECTRONTHORP2 Yes, you could do that too. I've refined my technique a bit, and I've gone to using a coarse file and vaccum pump oil, and then heating it up very hot and spreading a bit of molten solder about on the surface with a steel implement, which causes the tin to make a low melting alloy with the aluminum. That causes the aluminum to be very nicely tinned.
I'm pretty crap at electronics, but I'm ok with forging... I'm pretty sure you could have used either borax or table salt as flux for your solder.
I was cringing at 13:41 because I thought you were touching both the pins as you jammed the molex connector into the strip that was live at rectified mains voltage. Even after realizing that was not the live strip, I still cringed again when you bridged the pins with the pliers. I am glad to be wrong; fried Clive does not sound like a good dish.
I've got a pair of those generic cheap ebay snips, they're fantastic.
They're pretty good. I guess they do use quite a lot themselves.
Your rectifier setup makes it look like its only going through two diodes instead of 4 ?
Full four, but two underneath out of sight.
"A little armageddon" LMAO! That's awesome!
"You hope." What are you trying to say about what your audience finds entertaining? ;->
I just dug up the listing for these (Lot no. ends xx3648, right?) as I was expecting it to be one of those listings full of dodgy small-print, but - Rather tacky store presentation aside - I couldn't see anything like that. Pretty clear the seller knows less about what (s)he's selling than I do about what (s)he's selling! :-o :-p
Still...Given you appear to have been the first on the listing to have bought these, I have to admire your courage! If these were advertised for mains voltage (And let's face it, the seller could easily have missed a zero when typing "240v") I wouldn't want to touch them with a barge pole! :-p
Still, I'm curious: Split up into sections, do you reckon these'd be good for *low* voltage applications like PC case lighting? :-)
"Let's just shove it up" gets me every time.
Clive you made the connection end/endcap look so profesional
I recently got an IR camera and small monitor; both had bits and pieces of electronics in them, but neither were wired up; the camera was wired up enough that the lights turned on, but neither worked at the voltage described; which was 12 v...
have you tried searching for it on amazon? I've bought some and it worked well.
Clive, do you ever use dielectric grease to help exclude water from connectors? Other than the mess, are there any reasons to not use it?
I've toyed with that, but I'm aware that thermal expansion and contraction of air and materials can displace the grease and form moisture paths.
You should do a video on an old school depth finder/fish finder for a boat. they seem to be mechanical inside.
6:59 "It's slicing quite easily ... just like skin really" lol
"Do I have anything to use as stakes?"
Uses solid core wire
6:33 Diodes do have a small internal resistance, dontcha know?
Nice one reaching 200k, Happy New year looking forward to your 2017 vids
You're getting close to your 1000th video, any special plans?