Repairing a Neewer 660 Studio light - How Hard Can It Be? -- Episode 594

Thanks for the video. It's interesting watching how others do these things.

I'd have skipped pulling the caps off the board, as the probability of a ceramic cap shorting is quite low compared to a chip going.

It's very likely for a product like this that the processor will have the code protected, so in your place I'd consider a rework with a small SBC, where you can have a bit fun later extending the functionality, rather than trying to repair it.

It's not too clear from your video, but there appear to be two drivers and two controls. Are the LEDs split into a warm group and a cool group? And is there one control for the intensity and one for the colour temperature?

As beacon_dave says below there are 2 separate controls, which the micro converts into 2 seperate PWM outputs to LED drivers, 1 for yellow(ish) LEDs and the other for bright white LEDs, so you can adjust the brightness of each and therefore the colour temperature of the light output.

In hindsight removing the caps was unlikely to help, but I have had an occurrence where a ceramic cap had hairline cracked through it due to an impact, and I wondered if that had happened again.

My current idea is to use a 555 for control and avoid using a micro for a replacement control board, not really any reason other than to challenge myself to not use one in it's repair.

The most obvious thing you could do with a processor, as beacon_dave points out somewhere here, is add DMX. It's quite easy to do if you have some programming experience; the fiddliest bit is usually detecting the break: on some microcontrollers it's trivial, on others you need a bit of lateral thinking to puzzle out a way to do it.

But totally-analogue sounds good too. As an alternative to the 555 timers, you might also consider something designed with op-amps.

The thought of adding DMX is interesting, I could make a desk control for it then. Although I'd probably want to modify the 3 ones that still work too, so they could be controlled together. The controller would be an interesting extra project though

The thought of adding DMX is interesting, I could make a desk control for it then. Although I'd probably want to modify the 3 ones that still work too, so they could be controlled together. The controller would be an interesting extra project though