My roommate's LED lights went out, and she traced it down to a bad wallwart.
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SO YEAH it turns out that weird brown cylinder you've been seeing in the pictures is the capacitor. It actually exploded the can off it, with the can getting stuck on the top of the case.
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@foone I recognized it as soon as I saw it in the first picture~
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it's also possible this was always like this from the factory. Maybe this cap is just used for smoothing, and it being exploded just meant it did no smoothing. Maybe the other cap was doing the same, and that's why it ended up bulging?
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yeah. my knowledge of how caps work is limited (I only took the first semester of EE) but it seems to be between the VCC and GND on the DC side
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so probably this thing was just outputting way less smooth DC than it should. Maybe the LEDs have their own caps, or maybe they just flickered like mad?
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@dragonarchitect @foone
I like to use sense-of-smell for boards like this (where something recently croaked) -
asking my roommate for updates
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@HoustonDog @dragonarchitect sadly I'm anosmic, so I can't do the sniff-test
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Foone🏳️⚧️replied to Piggo :verified_horse: last edited by
@piggo it's NUDE!
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@foone @HoustonDog Oofh, that probably also means a whole lot of foods taste extra bland to you, too. :c
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@foone that makes sense, it's probably some kind of old paper wax like capacitor...
is it made out of cloth? though, intriguing.
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@loganer it looks like cloth to me, but I'm sure it's just some kind of paper
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okay amazingly, she says it never flickered and never actually died: it just got dimmer.
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so my guess as to what happened:
this cheap cap developed a partially short. It now began passing current through it. This caused it to heat up, boiled the electrolyte, and exploded the can off.
The thing STILL keeps working because now that it's dry, it's a really shit conductor, so only some of the current is going through the sploded-cap, which can no longer boil (and it doesn't get hot enough to ignite). But since some the current is diverted, the lights dim
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@foone act-of-god your way into a FREE 300 ohm resistor!
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I would test the resistance (and capacitance) of this exploded cap but I don't have access to my electronic tools at the moment. so into the ewaste bin it goes
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@parzivalwolfram 300 ohm resistors are cheap anyway if you own wires
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@RueNahcMohr I do, but I can't use it right now. I'm mostly bedridden for medical reasons, so my electronics workshop is unusable
