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Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.

Tag: Sewing

Fabric arts and machines

Juki TL-2010Q Needle LEDs: Installed!

The combined illumination from the COB LED bar on the rear of the arm and the (renewed) COB LEDs over the needle does a pretty good job of lighting up the work area:

Juki TL-2010Q Needle LEDs – cloth illumination

That’s a staged shot with a quilt square from the top of the pile. You’d (well, Mary’d) sew along the lines, not across a finished square.

The remaining deep shadows under the foot require an LED with an imaging lens on a gooseneck; precise piecing requires feeding fabric into the needle with alignment exactly where those shadows fall.

The light levels look harsh and shadowy on the bare base:

Juki TL-2010Q Needle LEDs – front

The shadow extending leftward from the needle comes from the arm’s shadow of the rear LED bar. The hotspot specular reflections of both LED arrays aren’t quite as glaring in real life, but a matte surface finish would be better.

The needle LEDs sit on the bottom of the heatsink inside the endcap:

Juki TL-2010Q Needle LEDs – installed

The COB LED PCB has a weird pink tint, perhaps due to the silicone filter passing all the yellow and blue light downward, with red light reflected into the PCB.

After one iteration, I settled on a 20 Ω 1 W ballast resistor:

Juki TL-2010Q Needle LEDs – ballast resistor

It drops 3.6 V to provide 180 mA of needle LED current and dissipates 640 mW, with the LEDs burning about 1.5 W to raise the heatsink just above room temperature. The extrusion on the rear arm is pleasantly warm and the resistors seem happy enough.

Looks good to us and it’s much much much better than the feeble Juki needle LED.

2019-03-05

Juki TL-2010Q Needle LEDs: Simple Cable Clip

A straightforward cable clip:

TL-2010Q Needled COB LED - cable clip — TL-2010Q Needled COB LED – cable clip

It looks better than the previous hack bent from a snippet of PET clamshell:

Juki TL-2010Q Needle LEDs - cable clip — Juki TL-2010Q Needle LEDs – cable clip

Ream out the holes with suitable drills, clean out the slot using Tiny Bandsaw™, and it’s all good.

In retrospect, the slot isn’t worth the effort, because it doesn’t open wide enough to admit the cable and doesn’t provide any clamping force; a simple block with two holes would do as well. If the heatsink didn’t already have a 3 mm screw in play, I’d use an adhesive-backed clip from the early Kenmore LEDs.

The OpenSCAD source code isn’t much to look at:

//-----
// Cable clip
// Reoriented into build position, because we only need one

ClipWall = 3*ThreadWidth;
Clip = [15.0,10.0,CableOD + 2*ClipWall];

module CableClip(CableOD = 2.0) {

ClipSides = 4*3;
ClipRadius = Clip.y/2;
ScrewOD = 3.0;
ClipOC = Clip.x - ClipRadius - CableOD/2 - ClipWall;

  translate([0,0,Clip.y/2])
    rotate([90,0,90])
      translate([0,0,0*Clip.z/2])
        difference() {
          union() {
            rotate(180/ClipSides)
              cylinder(d=Clip.y/cos(180/ClipSides),h=Clip.z,$fn=ClipSides,center=true);
            translate([ClipRadius,0,0])
              cube([Clip.x - ClipRadius,Clip.y,Clip.z],center=true);
          }
          translate([0,0,-(Clip.z/2 + Protrusion)])
            rotate(180/8)
              PolyCyl(ScrewOD,Clip.z + 2*Protrusion,8);
          rotate([90,0,0])
            translate([ClipOC,0,-Clip.y])
              rotate(180/8)
              PolyCyl(CableOD,2*Clip.y,8);
          translate([ClipOC - Clip.x/2,0,0])
            cube([Clip.x,2*Clip.y,2*ThreadWidth],center=true);
        }
}

2019-03-04

Juki TL-2010Q Needle LEDs: Trial Fit

Stripping the components from the back of a “5 W” COB LED gets it ready for action:

G4 COB LED PCB – stripped

Jumpering the pads with nickel strips harvested from various NiMH and lithium cells restores the original contact pads to service:

Juki TL-2010Q Needle LEDs – COB LED jumpers

A bit of bandsaw artistry produced a replacement for the OEM LED bracket:

Juki TL-2010Q Needle LEDs – trial installation

The epxoy bonding the LED to the heatsink happens a few paragraphs ahead in this story, but the view justifies it. The 2 mm hole just to the right of the 3 mm SHCS aligns the heatsink to a pin in the machine’s frame, ensuring it doesn’t twist around under vibration.

The view from below (in a mirror on the machine’s bed) shows the COB LED just barely fits in the opening:

Juki TL-2010Q Needle LEDs – trial fit

I screwed the bare heatsink into the Juki, applied double-stick tape to the COB LED, aligned LED with opening, and stuck it in place. Back in the shop, I traced around the LED to figure out what part of the heatsink needed removing, introduced it to Mr Disk Sander, and contoured it to match the LED.

Clean everything with denatured alcohol, put the heatsink on a glass plate, and clamp it to the height gauge:

Juki TL-2010Q Needle LEDs – heatsink alignment

Butter up the LED PCB with JB Kwik epoxy, having previously masked the contact pads (with masking tape!) to prevent oopsies:

Juki TL-2010Q Needle LEDs – epoxy on COB LED

Raise the height gauge, align LED & heatsink, lower height gauge to squish epoxy into an even layer, raise slightly to ensure the aluminum heatsink doesn’t short the nickel strips, and fast forward a few hours:

Juki TL-2010Q Needle LEDs – heatsink curing

Peel off the masking tape and solder a cable in place:

Juki TL-2010Q Needle LEDs – cable installation

The transparent doodad around the cable is a PET clamp snipped from a consumer electronics clamshell package, then punched and folded to suit. It didn’t work particularly well, so more rummaging will be required.

Foreshadowing: all this went swimmingly and looks pretty good (in a techie sort of way), but I’ve been running a nasty cold (stipulated: there being no pleasant colds). Building While Stupid is never a good idea, as the part of your brain in charge of telling you you’re about to do something catastrophically wrong is the first thing to go.

More to come …

2019-02-28
Juki TL-2010Q LED

For the record, Juki thinks this SMD LED provides enough light around the needle of Mary’s TL-2010Q sewing machine:

Juki TL-2010Q – OEM LED light

A detailed look at the active ingredient:

Juki TL-2010Q – OEM SMD LED

The 30 Ω resistor drops exactly 2.0 V, so the white LED runs at 67 mA.

We think it’s a glowworm, compared to the COB LED bar across the back of the arm:

Juki TL-2010Q COB LED – installed – rear view

I can do better than that, although not with juice from their 5 V power supply.

2019-02-24
Sewing Machine Light Bar Current

After more use and brightness tweaking, the COB light bars on the Juki TL-2010Q and Kenmore 158 now have 2.2 Ω ballast resistors setting the LED current to 370 mA and 300 mA, respectively:

Juki TL-2010Q COB LED – 2.2 ohm header

Changing from 2.0 Ω to 2.2 Ω produces a noticeable decrease in light, so 10% steps around 2 Ω seem to be about the right increment. The COB LED strips claim 6 W at 12 V = 500 mA nominal, so they’re running well under the spec.

Given that cheap 1% metal film resistor assortments use E6 or E12 value steps, at best, we may need two resistors in parallel for the next adjustments.

2019-02-21
“5 W” G4 COB LED Specsmanship

A bag of G4 COB LEDs arrived from halfway around the planet:

G4 COB LEDs – 15 and 18 LED modules

Those are “5 W” and “4 W” cool white modules, respectively, with another set of 4 W warm white looking pretty much the same. There’s no provision for heatsinking, which makes the wattage seem suspect; halogen G4 bulbs run around 20 W, for whatever that’s worth.

The silicone overlay becomes nearly transparent when seen through an ordinary desktop document scanner:

Circular 12V COB 18 LED panel

Highlighting the PCB copper pours shows 18 LEDs arranged in three series groups of six LEDs in parallel:

Circular 12V COB 18 LED panel – copper layout

The “smart IC” touted in the writeup turns out to be a bridge rectifier for AC or DC power:

G4 COB LED – 18 LED – components

The SMD resistors on all 15 modules measure 27.6 Ω, more or less, and seem randomly oriented face-up or face-down. I assume that one is face-down; maybe it’s just unlabeled on both sides.

Back of the envelope: there’s no way it will dissipate 5 W. The bridge drops 1.4 V = 2×0.7, the LEDs drop maybe 9 V, leaving the resistor with 1.6 V to pass all of 60 mA, so call it 700 mW.

Some measurements:

G4 COB LED measurements

With 12 VDC applied to the pins, the bridge drops 1.6 V, the LEDs 8.2 V, and the resistor 2.2 V, with 80 mA through the whole affair dissipating just under 1 W.

Huh.

Cranking the supply until the current hits 200 mA puts 15.7 V across the pins for a total dissipation of 3.1 W, burning 1.7 W in the LEDs and 1.1 W in the resistor.

Cranking the supply to 21.3 V drives 410 mA, dissipates just under 9 W total, produces a curl of rosin smoke from the PCB, and maybe delaminates the silicone around some of the LEDs.

OK, now I have a crash test dummy.

Given complete control over the application, I’ll strip everything off the PCB and bond it to a heatsink of some sort. With 6 LEDs in parallel, 120 mA (6 × 20 mA) total current might be reasonable and 200 mA (6 × 30 mA) probably won’t kill the things outright. Plus, I have spares.

An external 18 Ω resistor should suffice. Perhaps a pair of 6 Ω SMD resistors on the PCB, with fine-tuning through an external resistor. Call it 250 mW apiece: don’t use little bitty SMD resistors.

2019-02-19
Kenmore 158: COB LED Light Bar

With the Juki TL-2010Q all lit up, it seemed reasonable to apply the same technique to the Kenmore 158 sewing machine a few feet away:

Kenmore 158 COB LED – installed

In an ideal world, I’d match the COB LED module to the opening under the machine’s arm, but module length isn’t a free variable, so it sticks out a bit on both sides.

As you can see from the reflections on the base, this machine already has LEDs over the needle and in the endcap:

Needle LEDs – bottom

They run from a 12 VDC 18 W power supply with an adjustable boost converter producing 18 V for the nominally 21 V LEDs:

Needle LEDs power supply – interior

I replaced the coaxial power plug with a DE-9 connector:

Kenmore 158 COB LED – power supply

The 1/4 inch QD connectors on the AC power are marginally OK in this situation, as they’re tucked under the sewing table out of harm’s way. The other end of the AC line cord burrows into the sewing machine’s guts and isn’t easily removed, so this was the least-awful place for a connection.

The LED connector pinout:

Kenmore 158 COB LED – Power supply DE-9 pinout

The black cable comes from my lifetime supply of lovely supple flexible 28-ish AWG 9-conductor serial cables with molded-on male connectors.

I used some silver-plated / Teflon-insulated coaxial cable for the COB LED wiring. It burrows into the guts of the machine through a gap above the presser foot lift lever, then joins up with similar cables from the other LEDs routed through the (grossly oversized) heatsink fins:

Kenmore 158 COB LED – endcap wire routing

The cables meet the repurposed serial cable inside the arm, following the original route of the 120 VAC wires formerly lighting the glowworm incandescent bulb in the endcap:

Kenmore 158 COB LED – machine assembly

What’s not obvious in that picture: the cables pass under two stamped steel guides and through two stamped steel clamps, each secured to the frame by a cheese head screw in a tapped hole. They definitely don’t make ’em like they used to!

A 2.0 Ω ballast resistor produced the right amount of light, dropping 780 mV to run the LEDs at 390 mA and burning 300 mW. This supply produces 12.0 V at that current, so the COB LEDs run at 11.2 V and dissipate only 4.4 W.

The lower output voltage (compared to the supply on the Juki) is probably the result of the higher load from the SMD LEDs lighting up the area around the needle. We cranked up their voltage to match the COB LEDs, so they’re surely conducting more than the original (guesstimated) 50 mA apiece = 300 mA total. I have no convenient (pronounced “easy”) way to measure either their current or voltage; when the light’s good, it’s all good.

The other Kenmore 158 machines will eventually get the same treatment, but not right now.

2019-02-07