ACL Mk2 strobes

I haven't actually built up a string of these so it makes it hard for me to give you an actual current which really needs to be averaged across a dozen or more strobes but what I can say is that nzlongfellow posted a video and a note saying that he had 100 of them running off 90m of 2mm cable. At a guess I'd say you could probably say that the strobes have an average current of 30mA (350mA @ 9% duty cycle) and they will run down to about 3.6 to 3.7V at the end of the string and still work.
 
AAH said:
I haven't actually built up a string of these so it makes it hard for me to give you an actual current which really needs to be averaged across a dozen or more strobes but what I can say is that nzlongfellow posted a video and a note saying that he had 100 of them running off 90m of 2mm cable. At a guess I'd say you could probably say that the strobes have an average current of 30mA (350mA @ 9% duty cycle) and they will run down to about 3.6 to 3.7V at the end of the string and still work.
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Running 100 off a single 5V 25W Buck converter.
 
My Chinese pcb loaders screwed me over and there appears to be some random loading of some of the PIC IC's. Below is a picture that shows 2 PICs that are inserted wrong. The dot that marks pin 1 is closest to the NUD LED driver rather than being closest to the edge of the pcb. If you have any of these boards don't power them up. The PIC can be swapped over but powering up the board will destroy the PIC. Out of the 144 strobes of mine I found 5 that were around the wrong way. Other people have found none.
 

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AAH said:
My Chinese pcb loaders screwed me over and there appears to be some random loading of some of the PIC IC's. Below is a picture that shows 2 PICs that are inserted wrong. The dot that marks pin 1 is closest to the NUD LED driver rather than being closest to the edge of the pcb. If you have any of these boards don't power them up. The PIC can be swapped over but powering up the board will destroy the PIC. Out of the 144 strobes of mine I found 5 that were around the wrong way. Other people have found none.
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Thanks for the pictures. I'll have a look and see if the ones that failed me have been inserted backwards or not.
 
Alan I only have one PIC on backwards by the looks of it. That's 1 out of 96, not bad IMO.
Thanks for the tip, Cheers
 

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Boomer said:
Alan I only have one PIC on backwards by the looks of it. That's 1 out of 96, not bad IMO.
Thanks for the tip, Cheers
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Exactly ditto, checked them all out under the 5x led last night and unless I have 95 backwards, there is only 1. Now I will have to see how good I am at de-soldering that one, maybe I will use the heat gun backed off and some alum foil to protect the larger chip to flip it around.
 
Now that the rest of you made me look and glad you did :)
Found 1 backwards
2 that look like they have been slightly over heated but still readable
1 very over heated with no readable markings just a bunch of little bumps.
At least now I know about them as to not waste time with a few :)
 
I am still waiting on my 10X magnifier and conformal coating before building these, but I just had to see if any PIC's were on backwards......and I think I may have won the prize....There is a prize right.... :eek:
On one panel I have 15 reversed and 3 pics that have no markings to tell.
On the second panel I had 2 reversed, one pic visibly cracked and 1 with no markings....
Hopefully I can salvage some of these, but I have resigned myself to using them next year as time is running out and I have to spend more time on sequencing....
:D
 
I have 100 pre-programmed PICs on the way to me to replace any that were around the wrong way.
 
Driving the strobes off a 27 channel Ray Wu board and perhaps other boards requires a capacitor across the strobe + and - as the dimming function provides a tiny glitch which enough for the micro to reset. I have no idea what value is suitable as I haven't tried it yet. I would think that a 10uF 16V would be ample.
Alternatively the dimmer board could turn on a relay which would provide nice smooth 5V. I will work on getting both of these methods into the "manual" either tonight or tomorrow.
 
https://vimeo.com/113770364

Eventually I was able to get 30 of my 48 lights to work and used cat3 cable to join them. Used hot glue to seal them up (once in the sleeve and once in the c9).

I will see what I can salvage from the ones not working. I think for the most part I struggled with tacking the bulb to the board.

I ended up driving them from a single channel on a mr16 I got from DLA. Video isn't the best as I took from inside the house.
 

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drlucas said:
I ended up driving them from a single channel on a mr16 I got from DLA. Video isn't the best as I took from inside the house.
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Would you mind showing how you did this? You use a buck converter of some sort to drop it down to 5v?
 
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