I know it is not ideal, but why not have two kits... One through-hole with its own BOM and another kit for those of us willing to try surface mount. I'm sure that the dongle price would drop a bit if we used SM for most of the parts, and the dongle would be smaller.
just my .02!
Charles
Maybe I am not explaining myself well. It is not a matter of I could do either with no problem so I want to do SMD. It is a matter of the parts avaiable in the through hole format preventing me from going through hole. The through parts I could find are not for this world very long according to their manufactors. Since I am putting so much work and money into the project I can not move ahead with parts that will not be avaliable before long. I could build the controller using old technology that waste a lot of power as heat so that the light runs hot and it uses a lot of power. But that is not what I am doing on this. I plan, as do a bunch of others that have contacted me, to use them as outdoor lights year round so I want Efficent, long lasting units which means going effecient. The Aether uses hardly over 20 watts of power for the light it puts out
That is up in the 94% range of efficency. This means for 3 lights at full that is 60 watts which I can light my whole house at full brightness with. I would never want to use full for this kind of lighting from these lights it would be too bright for that kind of effect. So that means about 30 watts at half brightness to light my whole house.
Do the math... I can light it up for 4 hours a night all month for 3.6 kwh or about $.60 a month ( 4Hours * 30W = 120W... 120W * 30days =3,600W = 3.6KWH
Then during christmas season I can kick them up full power and do a heck of a show. Then put them back on my house. And doing so just involves moving them and plugging in power as there is no external controllers or power supplies to deal with on them. They are self contained in their housing needing no external items to operate when used in wireless mode.
RJ
P.S mike the smallest parts are 1206 and the ics are all SOIC so these are big parts for being surface mount. Anyone wnating to build them can do it and could do it with a soldering iron if they want I just prefer to use the griddle. I will show both technics in the build video so they can see how to do both.