Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
The remote control included with the SJCAM M50 trail camera did absolutely nothing. Not only did it not turn on the camera’s WiFi, the two indicator LEDs between the buttons didn’t blink:
SJCAM M50 remote – front view
With not much to lose, I removed those four screws and popped the back cover:
SJCAM M50 remote – interior
Yup, the OEM no-name CR2032 lithium cell was dead flat discharged. A new one perked it right up, with blinky LEDs and all.
Now I can check the camera for interesting pix without hauling it into the house:
The Canon LiDE 120 scanner on Mary’s desk gets considerable use by both of us, until a recent update of something killed network access to it. The usual searches revealedcomments suggesting the sane scanner program has deliberatelydisabled network access to USB scanners which use the net back end, apparently to prevent loops when one instance shares a networked USB scanner already shared by another instance.
I have no clue how all that works, nor why the change has apparently taken half a dozen years to reach our scanner.
The workaround required downgradingsane on the “server” PC (the one with the Canon scanner) to the most recent version that doesn’t enforce the prohibition:
The pamac GUI interface now shows sane as eligible for an upgrade, then reports that it won’t do the deed. That’s survivable.
At some point, not updating the sane package will cause other problems. Perhaps by then we’ll have moved the hulking Epson ET-3830 printer/scanner upstairs and can recycle the Canon scanner.
The next morning the dead section lit up again, albeit with a dim ring at its right end. I think one LED in that string failed open and darkened the whole string, then failed short under the voltage stress, and is now quietly simmering in there with slightly higher than usual current.
The lights over the workbench weren’t in the first wave of conversions, so they may be only four years old.
For sure, they have yet to approach their 50000 hour lifetime …
The big price displays at the Mobil station on the corner have always behaved oddly, but these replacements began failing within a week of their installation:
Mobil price sign – north face
That doesn’t look too bad, until you notice the number of dead LEDs in both red displays.
The south face is in worse shape:
Mobil price sign – south face
The green LEDs seem to be failing less rapidly than the reds, but I don’t hold out much hope for them.
The previous display had seven-segment digits made of smooth bars, rather than discrete LEDs. This one appeared after the segments failed at what must have been more than full brightness; the red LEDs were distracting by day and blinding by night.
Maybe they got the LEDs from the same folks selling traffic signals to NYS DOT? The signals around here continue to fail the same way, so I suppose DOT doesn’t replace them until somebody enough people complain.
The LCD gibberish comes from an interaction with the camera shutter. It scrolls a lengthy set of instructions, but the peeling labels demonstrate ain’t nobody got time for that.
You were supposed to figure out how to use this thing with no instructions other than the scrolling display. In particular, the multi-multi-function keypad has no labels.
I suspect most folks just haul out their phones and call the tenant.
The IR sensor on the under-cabinet LED lights I installed half a dozen years ago became increasingly flaky. Its wall wart power supply was on the hot side of uncomfortably warm, so I had an obvious culprit.
The data plate says it’s UL Listed, which is comforting:
Flypower LED wart – data plate
The open-circuit output of a 12 VDC power supply should not look like this:
FlyPower 12V 1A – no load
The horizontal scale is 100 ms/div, so those ramps seem much more languid than you might expect from a 60 Hz wall wart.
Adding a 16 Ω load to draw maybe 750 mA got its attention:
FlyPower 12V 1A – 16ohm load
The average may be 12 V with too-large dips at the expected 120 Hz, but looky at all the hash riding the output!
No wonder the IR sensor was having such a hard time. When the LEDs are off the voltage ramps between 16 and 5 V. When it eventually turns on the supply has impossible noise levels.
So I cracked the case and extracted the electronics:
Flypower LED wart – components
Those caps over there on the left rear don’t look healthy, do they?
Flypower LED wart – failed caps
No. No, they don’t and you shouldn’t be able to see the wiring inside the inductor between them, either.
Probing the Box o’ Wall Warts produced a similar-ish wart that only required harvesting and splicing the teeny coax plug from the failed adapter to put the LED strips back into normal operation.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 