Teardown of a flush mounting feature light
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- Опубликовано: 12 сен 2024
- A nice simple video showing a common eBay LED light that mounts flush to a wall and provides a splash of light on landings and stairs.
The little power supplies with these should not be regarded as being fully isolated. Some have basic electrical separation and others might be supplied with mains referenced outputs. So if you like these it may make sense to buy a suitable 300mA driver that complies with local standards.
The use of a Luxeon star style LED means that swapping in a new LED of your colour choice is fairly easy. If desired, the thermal coupling to the back of the housing could also be improved.
The typical search keywords for these on eBay are:-
led recessed stair light round
If you enjoy these videos you can help support the channel with a dollar for coffee, cookies and random gadgets for disassembly at:-
www.bigclive.co...
This also keeps the channel independent of RUclips's advertising algorithms allowing it to be a bit more dangerous and naughty.
You should make a video counting the flaws in that little power supply. As an electrician I have refused to install those kind of lights in several occasions. It would be nice to show the customers a video about those
I love these units and will try to track a few of them down in a while.
The housing is a work of art! I can see NC machines grinding away on the al-u-men-e-um blocks now.
The housing alone is by far the greatest cost.
If I end up with some, the set screw comes out and heat sink compound applied to the LED back.
Thanks Clive for this video.
I was looking for something like this to light up some photo prints on the wall. Thanks for finding them for me, 2x 👍
That would look very smart, having a low glow.
I REALLY don't like the wire passed thru the raw sharp edges of the milled aluminum housing. Entirely too easy for the insulation to be chafed off and cause a short circuit. At least it's not across the mains.
Well at least they provided the sleeving so you can push that through the hole during installation and hope/tie it in place to help. And since it's a stationary fixture I would not expect too much chafing after installation anyways. Having the driver incorporated to the metal housing would have made this much more fire resistant, though...
@@benbaselet2026 Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I'd tend to agree with you about stationary fixtures, but I also know that simple temperature changes and small vibrations can lead to insulation damage over time. Risk=low does not mean risk=none. Bad design even if low risk. They should have pushed the sleeving thru the hole and locked it in with a dollop of hot glue. Don't count on the consumer to keep your product safe.
I should explain that my personal history includes a near house fire - actual charring on the back of some baseboard trim, that we fortunately caught just before it would have ignited. So I'm a little skittish about poor insulation practices. In this case, it's not mains and is fairly low current, but the principle is still important.
@@Brandon_SoMD Especially when the occasional dirty-great lorry goes rumbling by and disrupts all your knick-knacks on the shelves ;-)
That's a large piece of aluminium before it's machined. No wonder the price has gone up.
Definitely machined? Are the marks from the rough side of a casting die? I’d be sprprised if it was milled from solid.
@@WineScrounger Probably a casting that is then finished with a CNC machine, makes for a cheap unit, but also faster production, as you do not have to hog out a massive amount of material. Likely you will also find the rectangular unit uses the same casting, just a slightly different CNC program, and there probably is also a version with a straight down LED as well to match, or even some with 2 emitters milled into it. I can easily see the casting being a spin cast unit, made on a tree in a steel multipart mould, so they get a dozen or more per casting run.
It’s cast then finished
Anybody see a less expensive version?
Thanks
Die cast most likely, then machine finished. They certainly wouldn't have taken a solid slug of metal and machined it out. That would cost way too much.
Looks pretty neat, except the hole for the cable looked awfully sharp. A grommet would have been nice there.
At least its an easy fix.
"the capacitor is discharged cause I just put my finger across it" 😂
It's the only 100% sure way to know if it's discharged enough or not... lol
As is tradition
The "eminently hackable" shows the priorities of a true hacker - my kind of person. Like they say, "void the warranty." 😂😂
And like they also say, "you don't really own something until you void the warranty".
Putting them in series with a single common led driver is the way I've done it. I've used meanwell in the past - saves having lots of cheap drivers that could fail (or burst into flames) I also reduced intensity by experimenting with resistors till I got the light I needed.
We really need standardised easy-to-replace replacement LED wafers or flat bulbs or maybe even a universal mounting system like that of a coin cell to hold them. When it eventually fails, that's a large chunk of waste metal which most people aren't going to entertain fixing and just buy another one. It's nice this one is so easy to get in to though and looks very smart.
That quick glance into the bottom of the large hole looked like the typical bottom of a hole made by an indexable carbide drill, they do leave a couple of varying angles that are almost but not quite flat. They are however quite good at drilling sideways into metals.
But as others commented, a huge amount of stock required - probably cheaper to do it of two pieces and a bit of welding.
I was just thinking “I wish there was a new video from Big Clive” 🥰
Less-then-three you Big Clive + the fabulous work you do on here making us all the wiser!!
Keep on keeping on an doing what you do best my friend!!
Biglove🥊 & Peace 🅿️🅿️🅿️
Interesting to see how much metal you can machine and still sell cheap
Looks like it's subsidised, especially when dispostage is included in the price.
Machining may have been from a simpler casting, not a bit simply lopped of round ingot.
I think I'd just use some thermal adhesive to couple the LED module to the housing, I've used that stuff to attach 1W LEDs onto things (metal, of course to dissipate heat) without the need for the "star" heatsink base and it holds nicely... :)
I’m surprised you didn’t check if the driver offered any isolation from the mains, given that there is no earth on that great slab of aluminium.
I assumed that it isn't isolated to a safe level.
I personally would dispose of the included driver and instead run multiple off of a higher quality third party driver. Perhaps also invest in some high CRI LEDs while I'm at it, assuming the ones included aren't already of good quality.
This looks really cool tbh, if I ever live in a two floor property I'll get them for stairs :)
CLIVE! I can't believe you are exposing the motherload! I have purchased a number of these and added thermal paste, gotten rid of the drivers and run a bunch of them off a quality 20W CC driver. The enclosure is worth the money alone. I just install an LED module to suit the colour temp required. I'll have to send you a pic some day of the installs.
It's funny that when you said "it's absolutely hackable" I was already thinking about how the mounting clip could be used for something different, how the metal block could be screwed to something else (maybe even build a desk lamp) or if the aluminium block would look nice or be useful for something not even lighting related. Then I noticed that I pretty much automatically think about stuff like that for every item I get into my hands.
I wonder if they sell Luxeon Star LEDs in pink? 🤔
Nice design, they might even be used in ceilings at around 20-30cm from the wall to give you some indirect lighting effect.
They do. For the hydroponics crowd.
@@bigclivedotcom *weed crowd lol
There's nothing stopping us from putting a neo-pixel in there either, or any other similarly mounted LED.
I’m amused that Clive helpfully tells us that “the light is back”.... Never mind that this is a video...🤣
I'd expect that to be for people who are sensitive to brightness changes so he gives a wee warning for them to close their eyes and then a clue when it's safe to open them again.
I really appreciate it. Clive's videos are really calm and I tend to watch them late at night. It's nice to know when to squint a bit.
The LED mating surface is that way because most tools you could use to make that hole would not cut well, especially not at an angle like that. Likely they drilled a pilot hole with a smaller normal drill first and to fix the shape would have required more setup and more operations.
I can think of two reasons (outside the obvious) why the price went up.
One, in the past they probably were making those in spare time between actual jobs so nothing sat idle and to cover costs, but now demand has overtaken their spare time.
Two, now that there are more of them they've likely had to improve the wire pass through and (if the edges feel sharp on yours) actually spend extra person time to deburr all the edges.
Can’t see this lasting long here in an Australian summer......
Makes a nice recess for redbacks as well.
Yay another Clive video I can’t get enough of these videos he should have a way to donate.
He has PayPal and Patreon, he just doesn't plug them at the end of every video. See the description.
If it's machined Aluminium it means it is better quality than just aluminised PE or PP.
Hacking them for 12v you'd have a decent accent light/ emergency light set up. At least here in North America where many buildings have a central 12v battery bank running several lights in power outages. Depending on battery size (presumably you could scale it) you could have a lighting system that could last for a day or even days if you wanted. 🤔 Plus they would look a lot better then the typical emergency light sticking out of the wall.
This reminds me of something out of early Dr Who, probably in the Dalek city. Certainly skimped out on insulation and heat sinking, but with half an ounce of nouse not difficult to rectify. (No pun intended).
Instead of using a round chunk of aluminum and milling it down they could use a scroll saw type device and a drill through to saw these out of a square piece as wide as one and as tall as one plus the thickness of the top piece, plus the blade thickness and some extra for milling and cleanup, then they could come out back to front to back and then have the sides cut with the same saw and then lathe it round and then finish mill the rest of the features like making the bottom square and the holes and threads and smoothing everything
nice heatsink. it’s a shame they didn’t design it better
Yep, a fair amount of machining for a simple light.
Possibly cast in a rough shape first to minimise machining.
@@bigclivedotcom Good point.
It does seem very penny pinching not to use heatsink compound.
Worth putting some in it you change the LED. Especially for a more powerful one.
'Super' excited. Oh dear.
I'd like to try weatherproofing some of these for use as illuminated directional driveway "catseyes".
You could but they will work until the first frost or rain haha
The light itself isn't much of a problem, the driver would be trickier. Running a bunch of these from a beefier DC supply that is somewhere safe would be my first thought.
There are some people who have such a boring monotonous voice, that you just want to spoon your ear drums out. You are NOT one of them
Listening to you describe electronics, is like Bob Ross explaining how to draw a little happy cloud. So soothing, even though sometimes you lose me in my mid-range knowledge of electronics.
You are the type of person who could describe the reproduction and sex life of a ping pong ball and yet, make it interesting!!! Have a great one, Clive.
Looks like it is neutrally Anodised too.
Price had gone up as eBay now charging vat on purchases. New HMRC laws in UK mandate market place must collect vat on oversees sellers
Louis Rossmann made a good video on this a couple days ago. Adds more paperwork for small businesses wanting to do business with the UK.
Clive has that chip's number.
Are these actually intended as picture lights? You stuff them in the ceiling and point them at a picture or other item on the adjacent wall...
Stuff like that usually has a pivoting mount so you can aim it correctly. That costs lots more.
They probably have many uses.
Great Video. Thanks.
Interesting teardown!
Clive - An odd question .. The power supply works down to 85v. Would putting a 2-1 transformer in front of the power supply change the power factor?
Intriguing little light
I was wondering if you could do a teardown of a Keurig coffee machine?
That does look like it's been CNC's from a solid lump - wow! How can they make a profit on that?
It may have started as a casting.
Could the price increase be related to the value of aluminium?
Interesting vid, going off topic now... the last few years I have been getting comfortable with Kicad, and love it, but now I want to do some mechanical design, and as it happens after a Kicad install you have the option to install FreeCAD, so I did, and I'm now starting to get the feel for it, I'm enjoying it very much and getting used to the various work benches available to me, I noticed a work bench called " openSCAD " I think that means you can use openSCAD from within FreeCAD, you have mentioned this CAD software many times before, in fact I believe your preschool teaching aid " The Woofler " was designed in this package and I Wondered if you can, indeed, use openSCAD in this way ?...cheers.
That is a chunk of aluminium & its not a cheap metal. The butchery of the cable inlet is not good or the LED held in by hope, it is a nice light though would be good in a hall or corridor.
With a suitable power supply and not a box that will probably set the house on fire.
$10.38 for a cold white in what looks like a plastic housing and $10.58 for the one he has. Oh! And $1.69 for shipping. WOW! What an increase.
How that is manufactured and shipped with a eBay seller also making a profit all for ten bucks is amazing
Hi Clive, recently saw a USB noise filter on Amazon. Not really sure what it does. Would love to hear what you have to say about them
Hi Clive,have you ever considered hacking one of those usb recording devices(the one that looks like a usb stick )i've thought about opening one up and fitting a normal leppel mike.do you think its possible
dave
It’s watt you would expect 💡
Why does the HOPI seem less flickery when just the feature light is on? I have a feeling you might've mentioned it in another video.
In low lighting, the simulated "shutter speed" of the camera changes, making the multiplexed display appear to flicker less.
Jeez. I'm taking pictures of ckt boards now. I blame BC. 🙂
Please would you tell me how many volts are used by the LED lights inside a 15 watt 240 volt bayonet bulb? I bought several because they are bright, and supposed to last for thousands of hours. But they get hot and break. The leds themselves look fine, but presumably their power supply has bust. I want to conjure up some sort of replacement
Nice
those look really good. too bad the back of the housing for the led isnt drilled flush
Slather on a good amount of heatsink compound and the LED will never know the hole is there.
I really doubt that it's machined from a solid block of anything. Diecast monkey metal of some sort with a few machined surfaces would be my guess.
Where can I buy this exact unit? I want the aluminum shell as it provides excellent heat dissipation!
eBay search keywords in description.
Bien 👍
You should break open A Satco brand led A19. 120V or 220v doesn't matter
Nice housing, but it was never finished. Like the cheap condos around here...
No mention of mains isolation to led chip !
Unknown with these cheap supplies. That's why I tend to suggest using known brand supplies.
Not bad for the led it self, but the power supply seems too hard to handle it...... anyway is ok
Flushed with Excitement..
Please review: 220V-240V Variable Router Fan Speed Controller Control Motor Rheostat 8A
Very nicely manufactured - so much for the misguided "Chinese Crap" meme! I feel I really need a few of these (although our stairs have LED Strip illumination that's lasted "forever"!) They would be nice as an outdoor ornamental / "feature" light, with a spot of remodelling as suggested (thermal paste, anyone??)
Just be careful if you do use it outdoors to seal it up. Water can and will get behind that lens.
@@joeythefoxxo Might be worth cutting some tiny notches in the lens edge - just enough to allow air circulation. Alternative is to drill a 1mm or less hole through the top (after all aluminium so reasonably soft), again to allow some air venting.
@@phils4634 A 1 watt led definitely doesn’t need that much air circulation. Use some thermal paste to turn the aluminum into a basic heat sink and then try your best to seal the unit up. Making more holes will allow water and other dirt to get it and the lamp won’t last long at all.
Not sure if too naughty for your channel, but tear down a Kiiroo Onyx+ for an expensive fire hazard. It uses an unbalanced 2S LiPo. It will burn houses down...
I'll give that a miss. RUclips somehow seems to detect "toys" even if I'm cryptic. Are the cells definitely in series, and is there at least a protection board even if not a balancer?
Thanks for the reply and totally fair enough. Definitely in series without balancing, but I don’t know of any way to prevent overcharging a cell without individual cell monitoring. If it’s possible I’d be curious how it’s done.
Oh and just realised what you meant by protection board. No there isn’t!
Why on Earth did I misread that title as a flesh-mounted feature light? 🤷♂️
Suggestion for a video "fractal wood burning". Saw it today and thought it may be interesting. Lots of electricity and danger 🤔
Big Clive has already done that: ruclips.net/video/3E12nnpWc5c/видео.html
@@robertlapointe4093 Ah okay, I must have a look
@bigclivedotcom
Have a question I hope you will answer.
It has nothing to do with this video.
My cordless screwdriver charger is not working anymore, nothing is coming out on the secondary side of the transformer.
How do you find out how many volts should be on the secondary side?
It says nothing on it, no name, no number.
I will try to find a new transformer but don't know what to look for.
It usually states the voltage. It may also be current limiting. The voltage would depend on the battery voltage.
@@bigclivedotcom Thank you.
It's 19,2 volt battery.
Funny how Flea Bay have just gone all chinesium - Ali Excess to compete !!
Why isnt there a notification.......thumb nail, for live stream? 23,01,21
or is there no stream?
It's on the BigCliveLive channel.
Yeh thanks, at 8.30 I was looking for your countdown stream on big Clive live but there was nothing.
Until I clicked on bell icon and there you were. Strange
WOW JUST WOW !
Did I hear correctly? The smoothing cap is likely to go.
Thanks in advance
Even with a full bridge the Chinese electrolytics fail pretty often
@@ferrumignis so just replace with the same value, higher quality cap then?
@@nelsondog100 the same or higher voltage and really the capacitance should be similar but I wouldn't sweat it too much, +50% I don't think it'll make much difference given electrolytics can be kind of sloppy anyway. It's not like it's a tube radio or amplifier or so 🤔 could be mistaken 😅
@@ollieb9875 thanks!
I just don’t see how this could be ‘cheap’ Clive? Surly such a large billet (?) of aluminium and all that wastage must be expensive? Yet all the other parts seem like she’d work stuff. All in all through a good , adaptable, piece of kit?
Thanks Clive
Ps; be good to see an out takes reel of the videos you don’t show????
Maybe it's cast into an approximate shape first to reduce the machining waste. Then the resulting chips could simply be recycled back into the pot of molten metal.
@@eDoc2020 yeah makes sense
It makes wonder why they didn't just cast the aluminum piece, with all that inefficient machining they did there. I do have to ask, though, why is the single diode such a bad thing on the driver? Should they have used a full bridge rectifier instead?
Also, how often do you check the email linked on the youtube profile? o:
Likely a CNC finished casting. The single diode is bad for the electric suppliers, as this results in a nett DC current flow in the final power transformers feeding the street, and this DC bias then means the core moves out of the region where it is nice and linear, and into a non linear region where core loss increases.
Enough of these small supplies and the DC current can destroy the transformer, which was a common thing in the 1960's Britain when TV sets used half wave rectification for the power supply. This resulted in a 11A current pulse per set, and multiply this by a row of 100 houses meant a good number of street power transformers blew up under what was a low night load, but they were being driven into core saturation. The transformers had to be redesigned with a core gap, making them less efficient, but less sensitive to DC, and also the standards were changed to prohibit half wave rectifiers in power supplies for domestic and commercial use.
Still happens in industrial machinery where you have vibratory feeders, which also use a half wave rectifier to provide the motion, so you have to have them stacked on the phases in alternate polarity so as to make the result roughly AC current, and overprovision the power transformer as well.
@@SeanBZA - or to put it another (and much shorter) way, half wave mains frequency rectification is absolutely crap. No right minded engineer would do this. What is saved in using only one diode in place of a bridge rectifier, you spend in having to have a larger electrolytic “smoothing” capacitor.
Is there a link to those magnifiers to inspect electronic parts for aging eyes?
Search on eBay for illuminated magnifier.
@@bigclivedotcom Is there a specific magnification power that works better for reading the small parts? 2x or 5x etc?
How about something like this? www.jaycar.co.nz/led-handheld-magnifyer-with-three-lenses/p/QM3519
@@BrendonGreenNZL thank you Brandon that looks to be a good alternative.
@@pd8559 IIRC, the middle-sized of the three lenses had the highest dioptre; which makes it actually useful
Where's the beef?
this could've been made by squishing some aluminum sheet...
Anyway, when i read 'flush' i was thinking toilets ;v
No earth
Can you please reverse engineer this magnetic pulser sold on eBay ( AMT-01 BelVar Low Level Frequency Magnet Field)
What? No square one for comparison? Heartbroken!
This was a square one, but I cut the corners off it to make it less dangerous.
Gotcha! It was not obvious from the dialog. Ugh! Even the simple ones aren't so simple...
But the square beam pattern could be nice !
Funny casting with a little bit of hand work cheap chinesium
The lens on this looks like an aspheric lens.
Glory hole lighting!
Where did you get the grub screw set from?
Grubs R Us.
I want Clive to tear down and reverse engineer a certain Goop candle.
What a waste of aluminium billet. That's like getting a tree trunk and cutting it down to make a toothpick.
It may have been machined from a casting.
@@bigclivedotcom Yes, true. I hadn't thought of that at the time of writing. It just looked the right diameter for it to be a billet.
I saw somebody do that.
Admittedly, it was in a _Happy Tree Friends_ cartoon.
@@bdf2718 _Happy Tree Friends,_ now there's a name I only heard of in RUclips's Copyright School. lol
@@ItsMrAssholeToYou Quite so. You could die cast that housing to net shape. No machining required except tapping the holes. But that die costs money.
Again with products with tags instead of names
Wouldn't that light fail EICR ? No Earth?
Even though a 'fixed' installation it could probably be considered a Class II or III item (see recent JW video) ruclips.net/video/eWHQRcO071E/видео.html
and those wires on the sharp edges of the aluminium and no isolation in the power supply? Yeah, Im not so sure how safe that thing is without hacking it.
@@Chuckiele It's isolated in the transformer.
Although not ideal, there's only about 3v in the cable passing through the roughly drilled hole. I have a feeling the sheath should also have passed through that hole which would have protected it.
@@chrishartley1210 are you sure? Might have just been a choke of a buck regulator, I couldnt tell quite clearly.
@@Chuckiele yes, I checked the circuit diagram for the BP9081 first 🙂
"heat sinked" ---> Heat sunk?
Interesting. I believe the common usage is "heat sinked". It's like "cladding" as a description of the material with which something was clad.
@@ItsMrAssholeToYou what about "drink/drank? Sink/,sank
@@ItsMrAssholeToYou You must be fun at parties
@@ItsMrAssholeToYou eww
Can I like, gift you an ifixit kit???
Thanks for the offer. Ifixit have offered one in the past, but I'm pretty loaded up with tools here.
@@bigclivedotcom Ah youre welcome man, I know how nice it is to have nice tools to work with. Its awesome that they reached out to you though....and yeah you seem to be pretty loaded with tools! I just like having all my stuff in one place, and I have been kinda spoiled by them. LOL
What a waste of aluminium to make.
They could easily used a aluminium molded box, and glued the frontplate to it.
It probably starts as a cast shape.
@@bigclivedotcom that could be it. And then a few passes of a mill to get the end result.
You are british, it’s aluminium 🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧
How is there comments from 6 days ago Clive? Have you been hiding take a parts from us?
Videos are released early for Patreons
Oh my, we’ve got another one here. Have you really not heard about Clive and the TARDIS time machine? The Doctor often gets Clive to fix up the TARDIS and lets Clive use it just to confuse poor old RUclipsrs...😁
Sigh... can i be popular and promiscuous again now?
You do not need to tell viewers "watch the light" : we are not in your room. At all.
It’s to the people who turn up their brightness and don’t want to be blinded after.
It's very considerate of him for people that might be watching in the dark.