happyinmotion
Well-known member
By this point, many of you know the drill: make shiny LED things, take them to Burning Man, discover interesting new failure modes.
I made five drivers for LED strips and discovered just how dust-proof my switches were not. Here's my guide to how to make portable and grunty LED strip drivers, complete with schematics and lessons learned. Key lesson is just to put everything in a ziploc bag.
Speaking of interesting failure modes, the Too Bright Hat (named coz 400 LEDs) slowly lost battery life over the week. It started lasting all night long, ended up only lasting an hour. Playa dust is conductive and there was enough dust on the exposed parts of the strip that current was leaking from power to ground. The isolation dropped from unmeasurable to about 10k Ohms.
I made five drivers for LED strips and discovered just how dust-proof my switches were not. Here's my guide to how to make portable and grunty LED strip drivers, complete with schematics and lessons learned. Key lesson is just to put everything in a ziploc bag.
Speaking of interesting failure modes, the Too Bright Hat (named coz 400 LEDs) slowly lost battery life over the week. It started lasting all night long, ended up only lasting an hour. Playa dust is conductive and there was enough dust on the exposed parts of the strip that current was leaking from power to ground. The isolation dropped from unmeasurable to about 10k Ohms.