Improving a small colour changing fibre-optic decorative lamp.

Published on April 6, 2017

I’ve bought one of these from ebay before, and it had a single 1W LED in it that lit the small fibre optic Xmas tree on the end with a bright red light. This one is different. It has a cluster of four self colour changing LEDs that make the tree morph randomly with colour, and it actually looks quite good.
But for some unknown reason they decided to spoil the subtlety of the effect by adding a single flashing colour change LED that not only looks a bit vulgar, but also messes with the other LEDs in series and makes them pulse too.
So the inside is a simple capacitive dropper with the notable addition of a zener across the output to cap the open circuit voltage. I should have drawn the schematic for this, but it’s a simple capacitive dropper.
By changing the flashing LED to another slow fade one it improved the effect greatly, and then I decided to just swap all the LEDs for the same style.
My power meter isn’t really optimised for such a low power lamp, but it showed its power dissipation as 0.5W. This does correlate to the modestly high 30mA current through the LEDs at around the 4.5V typically exhibited by the colour changing LEDs (4 x 4.5V in series = 18V X .03A)

I bought this version of the lamp on ebay at the following link:-

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