Bad dumb nodes

[davron12]

There are capacitors on the back side in parallel with each led, which I was a little apprehensive about. I was worried that it would affect dimming, but it doesn't. I believe this same change was also made to the new version of the pixels. According to the design Ray sent me, they should be larger wattage resistors, but I couldn't really tell looking at them through the plastic. I know that the resistor value was also changed for the red, but I don't know the exact new value. I was waiting for one to burn out before dissecting it. I'll take a look tonight in better lighting and see if I can tell for sure if they're bigger in size or not. All I know for sure right now is that they ran non-stop for over 2 weeks, which is more run-time than all of December for me, and there weren't any problems.

[chrisatpsu]

hey, if they work great, then we dont need the details   

[davron12]

So I'm a little puzzled. The resistors appear to be the same physical size.  If the resistor value went up enough that the wattage might have gone down enough, or that might not have even been the problem.  I'm curious now how much current was being drawn on the old reds. I'll have to hook it up to my mm and check.

I did notice that wiring is a darker color now.  Remembering reading on a different thread that Ray increased the size of the wiring for new smart strings, I tried to compare the old wire on the dumb strings to the new ones. I *think* that it may be thicker wiring now. It so hard to tell without a micrometer once you start going above 20awg. I can't visibly see a difference, but the new ones feel thicker between my fingers. This shouldn't have an impact on bad nodes. I'm just pointing this out as another improvement.

Whatever the case, it appears that dumb strings were produced for a while that worked, then sometime around August-November 2012 there was some sort of change that fried mostly reds, and now they've been changed and are working again.