Another switch for the temporary basement LED light strips failed the same way:
As always with such things, I suspect the only reason it has a UL mark on the back is because somebody else hasn’t missed theirs yet.
So I got a three-pack of inline switches with cute little indicator lights and set about replacing all of them:
These switches carry absolutely no regulatory approval markings, although they do claim to carry 10 A at 250 V, which I take with another load of salt.
At least here in the US-of-A, a 240 VAC outlet has two “hot” wires carrying 120 VAC 180° out of phase, which means both conductors must be switched. Despite the voltage rating, only the L path goes through the clicky switch, with the N path along a strap just below the switch toggle. Using it on a 240 VAC circuit will kill you stone cold dead should you assume whatever it controls is turned off.
I secured the Line and Neutral conductors with crimp connectors, rather than just wrapping the 20 AWG wires around the screw terminals, because the case halves join without perimeter nesting: a bare millimeter of air in the gap between the halves separates the terminals from my fingers. A layer of good electrical tape on each side improved that situation, but not by much.
The complete lack of strain relief clamping on the cords prompted me to route the wires around the screw bosses. After a function check, squirts of hot melt glue anchored the two cords somewhat better.
Aaaaand I secured that loose strap on the right with an (identical to the others!) screw from the Tray o’ Random Screws. The other switches had both screws installed, so this one must have been a QC escape.
They suffice for the purpose, but … caveat emptor!
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 
Comments
7 responses to “LED Light Switch: FAIL 2”
Where did you hide the ground wire connection? It looks pretty crowded in there, you did a nice job with the wire layout.
It’s the yellow (with-hidden-green-stripe) wire jinking along the bottom of the toggle over the
Neutralstrap. I managed to cut back the outer insulation on both sides to “lengthen” theLineandNeutralwires just enough to use the connectors, which meant wedging the extraGroundwire wherever it would go; it remains continuous, which kept another splice out of the switch.Not pretty and definitely not up to spec, but plausibly the best one could do with the situation at hand.
If it weren’t a temporary hack, I’d splurge on better switches.
It’s been a quarter century since I converted the Atlas shaper from 110 to 220V. I think I need to take a look at that power switch. I think it’s right, but… The mill-drill switch is known-good. Whew.
Side note: The openssh people just released a new version (9.8) where they quietly dropped all support* for DSA keys. I have both ECDSA and RSA keys on the house machines, and upon upgrade of he binary got a Cool Hand Luke “What we have here is a failure to communicate.”
Uninstalled 9.8 for the while, read the release notes, but don’t understand why the RSA key is ignored. [Recalls the tech-computer guru complaining in 1979 about the difficulty in getting two computers to talk to each other. The more things change… Sigh.]
I wasn’t planning on regenerating all my keys, but I think I’m going to have to do so. Only three computers right now, though the two in the shop will need keys in case they visit the house. And the airgapped one that Julie uses for games. On really rare occasions, it sees the LAN. [Wince]
((*)) You can enable DSA support at build time, but no. It’ll be fully deprecated for ’25, say the openssh people.
Aye, long ago I understood how my keys worked, but just the thought of wading through that again makes me feel like a nap is comin’ on strong.
Yes. If you don’t have any DSA or related keys, you should be OK with the upgrade*. I took a look at the directories and files. Sigh. I think I got ssh going, and walked away, slowly so it wouldn’t get mad. Finding a long-forgotten host name for a computer was a clue.
((*)) They go into some detail about the security fix. Before my eyes glazed over, I saw the phrase “it would take hours to do this breach”. Later when I can concentrate on it.
Ah, the problems wasn’t what I thought it was. The ECDSA key is actually supported, since it doesn’t have the liabilities of DSA.
The problem was that during the upgrade in Slackware, the sshd process was stopped and not automagically restarted. Apparently, if I had rebooted all of the machines, or gone to them and restarted sshd, it would have been fine. Must have been an issue, so that’s now been changed to an automatic restart (unless overridden in the /etc/defaults/sshd). It Just Works. whee.
I don’t know if this issue hit any of the other distributions. Previous upgrades in Slackware had no drama, unlike this one.
Now if WordPress (Delenda Est) could avoid drama…
The number of things that require rebooting has gone down, which means when rebooting is required it always comes as a surprise.