I'm very impressed by that power factor - 0.983! The technique of rapidly switching in and out sections of LEDs to match the voltage drop to the sine wave is a stroke of brilliance. It's great to see the problems with LED lighting being steadily eliminated by this kind of technical development. Makes me annoyed when people pooh-pooh new tech (eg electric cars) by pointing out all the issues with them, as if those things are insurmountable problems and we can never improve! Also good to see a complete absence of electrolytic caps in this thing.
Re: serviceability, there's an argument to be made for a thing being serviceable in which the intention is that you go out, remove the whole light fitting, plonk a spare one on, take the one you've just removed back to the workshop, fiddle with it until it's right, then that becomes your new spare.
Less time spent up a ladder is a net win overall. Especially mucking around with a bunch of tiny screws and what not. 3 wires 2 big screws and you're on to the next one. Then muck around back at the shop on a rainy day repairing the gubbins.
@@foreigncontaminant2015why would you throw the whole unit out? Just replace the modules inside as needed. You know every few million hours of use. You just don't do tiny wiring jobs up a ladder. Like how you don't rebuild a transmission while it's in the car. You get an exchange unit, send your used one off to get rebuilt on a bench. I replaced an led gu10 bulb in my hallway last week. It was quite novel. They have been installed for a decade. How often are you replacing your incandescent bulbs? You know the ones in the exact same package?
Before my retirement, I worked in the electronics industry. I have worked on similar circuits, but not this one. A lot of circuits are programmed after assembly. This happens in several different ways, and that coil on the board is one of those ways. Usually the first thing programmed is a test program. With that program, the whole circuit can be tested. This testing is mostly done automatically with a computer-controlled tester. After testing, the customer program is programmed into the processor and tested. When all is functioning as it should, the programming chip is removed to prevent reprogramming by unautorised people. That is why the programming chip is not on the board. A long time ago, we assembled and programmed a lot of little control boards for vending machines. The customer told us to remove the programming chip after testing, and we did. A few months later, we got a whole box of boards back to reprogram. They found a flaw in the programming, and field reprogramming was not possible. We had to resolder the programchip, reprogram, and test the boards. Afterwards, the program chip was removed again. We did reuse the chips for the next series; they were still good and worked. All in all, we reprogrammed about 2500 boards, if I remember correctly. A lot of work!
Don't get your hopes up; there are much more "tricks" to prevent reprogramming. Most boards we made were single-programming only. You program the chip, and after testing and programming, a "fuse" in the chip was blown, preventing reprogramming forever.
@@c.e.g7448 Most of the MCUs have a programming option that locks the program so that it cannot (easily) be read. You _can_ erase the entire chip and start from scratch, but that's non-trivial. Or pay some dodgy company to extract the object code for you using various tricks (including decapping the chips and probing them) if you're aiming to clone it in volume.
Umm, yeah, but it's got a PIC micro with the ICSP connections broken out to the edge of the board, so it's not too difficult to reprogram if something terrible goes wrong and there's no real reason those same connections couldn't be a UART connection too if the MCLR line isn't driven.
That sounds convoluted, the standard way is to program boards via bed of nails or pogo pins, no chip on the board itself needed and certainly not another production step of removing a chip from the board. I guess back in the day they did things differently, if you want protection just set those bits or fuses depending on your microcontroller. Though I doubt a streetlight would contain any kind of sophisticated software with sensitive IP.
power company here in Canada surprised me with this upgrade one day when i got home. 6 months later i still prefer the high pressure sodium i had. don't like the cold white. not great in the snow, the colour...cheers from the maritimes. :)
yes, astronomers prefer the sodium lights as they create less light pollution, the narrow spectral emission can be filtered out, unlike the wider band "cold white" as you say.
I live in Germany next to a huge river ( the Rhine) and it perfectly cuts the two sides of the hills where I live. If you go on top of the hill on a plateu at night you can see that the other side of the river gas LED only while my side still uses sodium lights. The LED just looks ugly and industrial from above.
@@NinoJoel led headlights instead of the factory halogen work way better at night. Am enjoying that upgrade. The nearest municipality swapped the sodium for led. The footprint the led has is drastically smaller than what it was originally designed for with the sodium. Do suppose the power savings adds up. Our power bill decreased nearly $7/month on the flat rate of the street light.
@@absolutely1337 well we don't have these problems here. We don't pay for the power that the streetlights use. The swapping your headlights for LED is illegal and will get you in big trouble. Rightfully so because most of them are either to bright and endangere the traffic or are not suited for the reflector design the original headlight had. If you swap them most of the time they will alter the area the headlight illuminates which is dangerous as well for other drivers.
After working in lighting controls for 30 years, I get the feeling that it senses the level underneath it and dims accordingly. This would explain why it started at full, looked at your white ceiling and dimmed to half then looked again and as the level was higher than the 20 or so lux it wants, it assumed that there is sufficient other light and dimmed to off. Street lighting has so many rules and regulations to it I’m not surprised the circuit could drive you into madness. Tiny improvements in efficiency or power factor could be the clincher for a 7 figure contract. Maximum of 64 devices in a single DALI network. And remember, DALI isn’t polarity conscious unless it is !
A damn fine piece of engineering, for a change - real deal pro stuff, very nicely made. Lovely thermal design and ingress protection in the LED module. I never heard of DALI before. Definitely very well worth exploring.
It makes me wonder if Dali is the brand name or the name of the communication standard. In Germany Dali is a type of 2 wire communication system for house or industrial controll systems. Also often found on light systems
One thing I noticed when LED street lamps first started showing up, was that the quality of light was different, not just the colour. The old sodium vapour lamps cast a very diffuse light that seemed to spread everywhere. This was bad for light polution, but better for safety, because it allowed you to see effectively in the dark. The new LED lamps seem to cast a spotlight downward, which is better for light pollution, but means that you can't see anything when not directly underneath one.
Our village has been slowly converting to LED. There's one lamp that's above a tree branch and the shadow / lit area below shows the individual LEDS, it looks like a bunch of squares. Move noticeable when there's a bit of wind.
Some of these LED street lamps on rural roads are terrifying - they make it almost impossible to see the difference between grass verge and the type of road surface they use in Lincolnshire. It's possible to just drive into a ditch on a sharp bend if there are no other road signs warning you of the bend which is quite common on single and narrow carriageway country lanes.
Might be a function of age in my case but on a recent occasion I returned to an led lit airport car park late at night and really struggled to see the zone signs let alone my car!
@@charliesoffer The pair of LED driving lights I installed on my Tojo make for excellent spotting of the Roos etc at the road edges. However the savage reflections as you pass road signs tend to periodically blind you!
Street lamps that change intensity and color temperature automatically to suit various weather conditions would be great. Personally I prefer sodium color.
years ago i experimented with this. i used a 10W sky blue led with a 10W 2200K yellow. one faded into the other with pwm from 555 timer. mid setting looked like real lightbulb light. something like that could work automatically with a fog detector, etc. inside a street fixture. yellow increases visibility through fog. i never built the detector, but i found out cops are interested in color changing lights on regular cars. project cancelled. 😞
It would be easier with sodium at night - there's a pretty long underground passage where I live, and I dread it every time I drive through - they really overdid the number of LED lights and it's blinding - by the time I exit it's hard to see pedestrians even in front of my headlights...
In those connectors, both sides are spring connectors, one side has a convenient button to release the wire, but on the side where you cut the wires, the spring must be released with a tool, e.g. Fluke T150 measuring probe fits well.
The entire housing, is the heatsink... I've had a couple different models, much larger and brighter that I got fired up. Love them... You know it's good, when Clive gets perplexed 👍
Haven't watched one of Clive's vids for ages and had forgotten how excellent they are [not being paid in any way here :-) ] He's a bit like an OS map : so much information packed into such a small compact time-space and easily understandable even to the uninitiated - and that's a skill!! Can't believe he hasn't been approached by some sort of college/uni/lecturing faculty... always best to have someone who's actually *_done_* the darned job. Those who have a endured a training course will know what I mean when I say that you can always spot the one's who never *_actually_* did the job.
“Oi Bert, we’ve got an order for one lamp and pole”. “What’s that Fred? a hundred or a thousand”? Fred: “one, just one, the guy must want his own personal streetlight”. 🤣
Clive - thank you for that. Fascinating. So much engineering goes unnoticed in everyday things like this - its fascinating to get such a teardown. Much appreciated.
Perfect retrofit solution for a change as when you are at the top of a Van Mounted inspection lift it can be like an Alton Towers ride in the wind and you want to get the job done quickly
Big Clive appreciation comment! Been subscribed for about a year now. Was less than a noob when I first found his channel. I've learnt so much. Grateful for people like Big Clive 🙏
Interesting video. The one question I have about led lights is why they don't generally put frosted diffuser over them as the matrix of point sources leaves retina effects after a direct glance. My local swimming pool put up these huge flood lights to replace the florescent tubes. They were awful so I complained & they replaced the lens with a frosted version.
Living in Berlin which still has quite a few gas lamps, I have come to appreciate them. They have a very brilliant light and the color reproduction, especially for photography, is wonderfully perfect
With the benefit of hindsight or by RTFM at 12:05 we see the 4 wires that we did not need to cut in order to change the LED panel and we then retain the lens and heatsink bits but hay ho ! and the live neutral and earth were in the right order...fine video and nice interesting item...cheers.
I installed about 2000 Italian sourced LED street lights. That was a fun job and it had a controller on top which meant each individual light could be controlled.
Always interesting to watch these videos as this is the side of the industry I don't have experience in. There's a lot of crossover with electronic and electrical equipment be it domestic or commercial. Far more than there was say 30 years ago.
Thank you, Clive, my, but things have progressed since my days of playing with 90W SOX fittings in the '70s! The NEMA Photocells had Bi-metal strips in them to provide the 1-minute purge delay in those days, and the 'safe' way to dispose of the lamps was using a metal dustbin full of water and a rock!
Thanks for explaining DALI. As a theatre guy, I know DMX well enough that I could probably bit-bang it if I had to. First spotted DALI helping a customer with their house lighting -- they weren't using it, but it was supported by the fixtures. The rectifier explains why I never saw a polarity indicator.
That NEMA connector is interesting. It's similar to the NEMA L-series twist-lock connectors (e.g., the NEMA L5 connectors often used in North America for stage lighting, also commonly found at RV parks and marinas, or the NEMA L6 connectors frequently used for 208V or 240V connections in server rooms.) But it's not the same as any of those. It must have been-designed specifically for the ANSI C136.41 streetlight dimming specification.
The main thing I remember when they put in the LED street around here was the shadows cast the dappled lamplight and many shadows that came from the lighting. Instead of one... you got this array of you got a multi shadows super cool and I still like it. I do miss the orange a little bit
Pre-set dimming - the lights on our street do that, at 00:00 they dim to 50% brightness then at 05:00 return to 100% brightness before going off at sunrise. That spec sheet gives the impression it's programmed at the head for each light which would mean they have a concept of time some how? I always thought it was just a signal through the DALI network from a central controller to enable/disable the dim mode as every light on the street does it within seconds of each other.
Well, this is a surprise. I immediately recognised the logo as belonging to the Spanish Parastatal INDO (Industria Nacional de Óptica). Its core business is the manufacture and supply of frames, lenses and contacts to the Spanish retail optician sector. I was not expecting such industrial applications. I grew up wearing INDO glasses.
How we've done infrastructure elements is to have on hand more than the in-service quantity. That way you swap units out as needed then service them and return to the inventory.
I have seen these type of light fixtures around a village i walk through at night and they turn on by motion detection. Just as i approached it turned on,so the detector must angled. An impressive design.
The other side of the quick connector is actually relatively easy to remove the wires from if you use an extraction tool/rotate the wires but not something you want to be doing at height.
Have to say that I did a double take when I saw the power factor on the Hopi - I wasn't expecting that! I think that the last phrase sums things up nicely "well engineered" rather than "half copied" or "cobbled together from a datasheet" which is what happens with a lot of other products.
Where I live, they switched from sodium lights to leds, but then the phosphor coating started peelong off of the led chips. It left them giving off crazy bright blue/uv, so they went back to the sodium lights.
where do you live? .. here (scotland) the council has clearly went through several phases of led lighting from the early crap to what now is , ohnestly pretty decent.
@denisohbrien I'm in Wisconsin, northern US. About a month after the leds were installed you'd see one or two each block that had failed. Then in the winter, after a cold snap (-25c) about 2/3 were missing the coating.
Quite a shift from halogen . Interesting . No joke , when I was young I could walk down a street lined with halogen street lights and as I walked under one it would go out . For real ! Those lights were at the top of ,maybe , a 30ft pole . To this day I still can not figure out what was going on there . Anyway , as always Clive..Nice breakdown . :O)
It’s fascinating to see how complicated streetlights have become! Can’t help feeling that the way the streets where I used to live is far simpler maintenance wise (literally just 40W bare bulbs with rusty shades over them - and probably not earthed at all).
What a cool device. I'd love to see one of these running on a high speed camera to see the individual LED's running thru their cycles. Would be really interesting.
To quote Jurassic Park: "Spared no expense". One hell of a piece of engineering and manufacturing right there. A world of difference from the Chinesium you often deal with!
Wow that's amazing 😮 and yeah the amount of different devices available in SOT23 makes reverse engineering really difficult at times, great video as always 😎
I think with the LED street lights sometimes being a bit dimmer, dog food manufactures should be made to add a glow in the dark material. Just to make it a bit more obvious where the💩💩 are.🤣🤣 very interesting light I was thinking, a few years ago it would have been so expensive to buy a street light for teardown, but now with China churning them out by the millions the price and availability to us non-street light workers we can all have a look at them 2x👍
I have had some reasonable success with a straightened out paperclip when releasing cables from push in terminals, I often used to change the HF ballasts on fluorescent light fittings when they failed rather than replace the whole fitting and although I didn't need to re-use the connector on the old ballast it did leave the cables full length.
I found a possible correlation between those ACRICH3 controllers and the NEMA devices. The NEMA devices are capable of using 0-10V (or 1-10V) protocol, plus others, as well as DALI. I wonder if the 0-10V protocol can be used to talk directly to the ACRICH3 controllers. That would certainly make it possible to simplify the circuitry, clearly not in this case though.
I found one of those NEMA modules in the road the other day. I was wondering what it was and where it had come from. Now I know. One of the street lights has lost its dusk sensor.
I was involved in a project where we plug a controller into the nema socket that piggy backs onto the RF home power meter network so it could be dimmed during the middle of the night, report consumption, life etc - even a gps location which sounds daft but is in fact to confirm it's exact location when installed which is important.
you have to see the street led unit i have. its got a massive control box, funky cap think on the top (like the one in clives video) and 44leds. it's a beast for REALLY tall poles on main roads. 400v but i put a 13amp household plug on it and it runs perfectly.... except ... it only stays on 5 minutes test period and turns itself off. i suppose there must be a dusk sensor in it like clive showed, or some kind of timer/ wireless controlled network?
Nice street light fixture, a compact "driverless" COB LED. Components galore, one can only imagine what's coming next to further complicate the interior of an electric light source nowadays. Quite interesting, but I too still prefer HPS as night light. Curious how insects loved the older discharge tech, mercury and sodium, swarming around the lamps, but just a fraction is attracted to Leds. Cheers 💡
You can disconnect the wires (on the side without the buttons) by holding and pulling the wire with one hand while twisting the connector back and forth with the other hand.
Sorry for the spam I used to watch your videos long time ago I been somewhat busy n I just checked out sense I seen a short happy to see you doing good interesting tools n some fun things always on this channel thanks for the content
An intriguing power supply design, as you say. Two very high power mosfets but seemingly no switcher or inductor. Perhaps just a simple on-off and that's why at least one is getting hot.
well noticed, on a similar subject would anyone reading this have any advice for me, I'm replacing the capacitors on a couple of led light fittings (400V 15uF 130degree electrolytic). What type or brand would make an economic but long-lived repair - is there a reason to replace with electrolytics or can i use one of the other types without issue?
@@Derek_Garnham Main caveat I know is that ceramic capacitors can lose a lot of capacitance with increasing DC bias. Personally I prefer to replace electrolytics with electrolytics, but get a top quality brand (usually Rubycon or Panasonic) and if available a higher temperature and/or voltage rating (for a light fitting I rate temperature more important than voltage, but I choose both when I can).
From their website on a similar model : " A temperature dependent soft start feature should be deployed to protect against LED failures at low temperatures". Cold day, perhaps.
Even when it's a completely boring and not interesting thing to me, whenever Clive sits down and starts talking about it - I can't stop listening. Don't know how you do it. Must be the secret which brought your channel over 1M subscribers without ritual words «like and subscribe».
Some LED street lamps have motion sensors in them that makes them brighter when they detect movement. It makes it harder to do a sneaky approach on a street.
Some have cameras, Infrared, AI sound sensor systems that detect sounds like cries and gunshots or car crashes. Even that isn't shit anymore because any of those can trigger drone surveillance in a neighborhood. The US is so screwed lmao
I found out that some of the street lights close to where I live have that feature (I wondered why the lights seemed to get brighter as I passed under them)
The fun part of the 0-10V Control pins of many LED drivers is, that they often can be driven directly from a microcontroller using PWM as I noticed. No need for 10V in your circuit then
Reminds me of the streetlight unit I got off ebay a few years back, a 30-watt 6000k job which I made non-functional trying to take it to bits, though it was a dumb light, no NEMA socket, DALI or dimming stuff, just a DOB LED panel that was rather bright before someone rather dim broke it... :P
8:48 either use a tbin screwdriver to release some blade (there are many holes ) or turn the cable to pull it, or just change the connector with the led.
This looks very well made. I don't suppose anyone would bother repairing these. The 'Electricians' would just change the head and weigh the old head in for scrap.
You mean the G39 light fitters. A stunningly shallow one day slideshow that instantly qualifies unskilled labour to work on outdoor electrical equipment.
@@bigclivedotcom you think thats shallow, I was in a training centre in edinburgh today, and they had a whole room dedicated to forklift training .. now i have worked in and around warehouses all my days and never met a forklift operator with a license to do so, to a point where i presumed there wasn't one . atleast these guys get training to change a bulb.
@@denisohbrien Here across the North see a lot of job ads list a requirement for a forklift drivers license and job placement agencies often send the unemployed on a forklift training course, because it's a cheap form of "upqualification" .
The city by me is replacing the blue LEDs installed by the state and replacing them with yellow LEDs that are being tested by clear skys to see if there's less light pollution, (so far the answer is yes)one thing thats interesting is on a pedestrian path the lighs are motion sensing, squirrels and cats don't trip them but Dog's and Foxes do. Some people didn't like the dark paths saying oh someone could hide him inside of the bushes and I won't see them while they wait for the light to go off but the weird thing is when there's no lights on you actually see the people hanging outside of the path better than with the lights on.
Just have them light up at a low level when no motion is sensed. I've seen examples (to conserve power on solar/battery) that do it, and it could be applied to regular streetlighting.
You would think the led module would just unplug after removing the 4 brackets holding it on. So it still has to be taken from the lamp post for servicing. Gaz Yorkshire.
Was the different power on sequence you saw related to temperature? One feature this light has is a temperature dependent soft start feature to protect against LED failures at low temperatures.
You should try to get ahold of one of those fancy radiowave bike/pedestrian road crossing sensors. They are all over my area and ive always wondered exactly how they work
I just wish they would put a small, possibly reflective, shroud around the edges to direct the light down below horizontal more. It would help cut down the point source glare.
That looks like a traditional series linear regulator setup. Probably used because it’s more reliable than anything else - as long as the zener is properly rated, it’ll last forever.
I thought YT recommended me a video i have already watched wuth a grey lamp but title differed so i clicked and was welcomed with another construction :)
Some time back I had to design a DALI master, which supplies the power and controls everything. It was a real pain because, at least back then, the voltage levels defining a '1' and a '0' overlapped! You had to figure out what the current idle high voltage was (dependent on how much the slaves were drawing) and then generate your 0/1 crossing from there. I would up using edge detection as easier. Design hint: never overlap 0 and 1 voltages!
Wonder if the coil plus 8 pin chip is for an optional RFID programmable but I2C accessed EEPROM containing settings. e.g. the STMicroelectonics ST25 family.
Looks like the main connector was marked as if it was a 4 way, for instance, live, switch live, neutral, earth Maybe in a line of lights, just one of them has a dali capable sensor that brings all the lights on at the same time, useful where some lights may be shaded by trees etc.
You can remove the wires from that piano key connector without cutting them, you need to insert a pin in the hole above where the wires enter the connector. This will then release the wire.
I'd really love to know the specs on that Littelfuse surge suppressor? These things are so important. Not much point having a lifetime rating of hundreds of thousands if the electricity supply does it in much sooner. It's not just trash from other lights. It's localised surges from lightning, plus some areas have other sources of surges (industrial equipment etc).
I don't see much use for Dali here in Czechia. Cities have limited budgets so they usually replace only the light fixtures and keep the old poles and cables. In some places, there are cables from 50s still in use. Also the pohotocell sockets are not a thing here. Streetlights are swictehd centally from the switchboard using a contactor controlled by a clock.
In supermarket coolers, the LEDs dim until a body moves in front of them and then ramp up in brightness. Way cool and somewhat creepy at the same time.
Great thing about LEDs is that they withstand frequent switching very well. That said at my supermarket the lights go out all the way in the freezer cases and turn on with a loud CLICK when approached.
I'm very impressed by that power factor - 0.983! The technique of rapidly switching in and out sections of LEDs to match the voltage drop to the sine wave is a stroke of brilliance. It's great to see the problems with LED lighting being steadily eliminated by this kind of technical development.
Makes me annoyed when people pooh-pooh new tech (eg electric cars) by pointing out all the issues with them, as if those things are insurmountable problems and we can never improve!
Also good to see a complete absence of electrolytic caps in this thing.
Re: serviceability, there's an argument to be made for a thing being serviceable in which the intention is that you go out, remove the whole light fitting, plonk a spare one on, take the one you've just removed back to the workshop, fiddle with it until it's right, then that becomes your new spare.
yeah, highly doubt the intent is for the module to be field servicable. Nice unit though!
That's how we do it. ✊
Remove the whole unit and replace... that's disposable. And that's why I'll never use LEDs in my garage.
Less time spent up a ladder is a net win overall. Especially mucking around with a bunch of tiny screws and what not. 3 wires 2 big screws and you're on to the next one. Then muck around back at the shop on a rainy day repairing the gubbins.
@@foreigncontaminant2015why would you throw the whole unit out? Just replace the modules inside as needed. You know every few million hours of use.
You just don't do tiny wiring jobs up a ladder. Like how you don't rebuild a transmission while it's in the car. You get an exchange unit, send your used one off to get rebuilt on a bench.
I replaced an led gu10 bulb in my hallway last week. It was quite novel. They have been installed for a decade. How often are you replacing your incandescent bulbs? You know the ones in the exact same package?
Before my retirement, I worked in the electronics industry. I have worked on similar circuits, but not this one.
A lot of circuits are programmed after assembly. This happens in several different ways, and that coil on the board is one of those ways. Usually the first thing programmed is a test program. With that program, the whole circuit can be tested. This testing is mostly done automatically with a computer-controlled tester. After testing, the customer program is programmed into the processor and tested. When all is functioning as it should, the programming chip is removed to prevent reprogramming by unautorised people.
That is why the programming chip is not on the board.
A long time ago, we assembled and programmed a lot of little control boards for vending machines. The customer told us to remove the programming chip after testing, and we did.
A few months later, we got a whole box of boards back to reprogram. They found a flaw in the programming, and field reprogramming was not possible. We had to resolder the programchip, reprogram, and test the boards. Afterwards, the program chip was removed again. We did reuse the chips for the next series; they were still good and worked. All in all, we reprogrammed about 2500 boards, if I remember correctly. A lot of work!
wow thats super interesting. a lot of board programming :) got me thinking now about how many doohickies around the place could be reprogrammed now
Don't get your hopes up; there are much more "tricks" to prevent reprogramming. Most boards we made were single-programming only. You program the chip, and after testing and programming, a "fuse" in the chip was blown, preventing reprogramming forever.
@@c.e.g7448 Most of the MCUs have a programming option that locks the program so that it cannot (easily) be read. You _can_ erase the entire chip and start from scratch, but that's non-trivial. Or pay some dodgy company to extract the object code for you using various tricks (including decapping the chips and probing them) if you're aiming to clone it in volume.
Umm, yeah, but it's got a PIC micro with the ICSP connections broken out to the edge of the board, so it's not too difficult to reprogram if something terrible goes wrong and there's no real reason those same connections couldn't be a UART connection too if the MCLR line isn't driven.
That sounds convoluted, the standard way is to program boards via bed of nails or pogo pins, no chip on the board itself needed and certainly not another production step of removing a chip from the board. I guess back in the day they did things differently, if you want protection just set those bits or fuses depending on your microcontroller. Though I doubt a streetlight would contain any kind of sophisticated software with sensitive IP.
power company here in Canada surprised me with this upgrade one day when i got home. 6 months later i still prefer the high pressure sodium i had. don't like the cold white. not great in the snow, the colour...cheers from the maritimes. :)
yes, astronomers prefer the sodium lights as they create less light pollution, the narrow spectral emission can be filtered out, unlike the wider band "cold white" as you say.
@@karhukivi interesting
I live in Germany next to a huge river ( the Rhine) and it perfectly cuts the two sides of the hills where I live.
If you go on top of the hill on a plateu at night you can see that the other side of the river gas LED only while my side still uses sodium lights.
The LED just looks ugly and industrial from above.
@@NinoJoel led headlights instead of the factory halogen work way better at night. Am enjoying that upgrade. The nearest municipality swapped the sodium for led. The footprint the led has is drastically smaller than what it was originally designed for with the sodium. Do suppose the power savings adds up. Our power bill decreased nearly $7/month on the flat rate of the street light.
@@absolutely1337 well we don't have these problems here.
We don't pay for the power that the streetlights use.
The swapping your headlights for LED is illegal and will get you in big trouble.
Rightfully so because most of them are either to bright and endangere the traffic or are not suited for the reflector design the original headlight had.
If you swap them most of the time they will alter the area the headlight illuminates which is dangerous as well for other drivers.
After working in lighting controls for 30 years, I get the feeling that it senses the level underneath it and dims accordingly. This would explain why it started at full, looked at your white ceiling and dimmed to half then looked again and as the level was higher than the 20 or so lux it wants, it assumed that there is sufficient other light and dimmed to off.
Street lighting has so many rules and regulations to it I’m not surprised the circuit could drive you into madness. Tiny improvements in efficiency or power factor could be the clincher for a 7 figure contract.
Maximum of 64 devices in a single DALI network. And remember, DALI isn’t polarity conscious unless it is !
A damn fine piece of engineering, for a change - real deal pro stuff, very nicely made. Lovely thermal design and ingress protection in the LED module. I never heard of DALI before. Definitely very well worth exploring.
It makes me wonder if Dali is the brand name or the name of the communication standard.
In Germany Dali is a type of 2 wire communication system for house or industrial controll systems.
Also often found on light systems
DALI is the trade name for the IEC 62386 industry standard. @@NinoJoel
@@NinoJoel if I understood correctly, it's a communication standard.
That's because these are purchased by governments, and businesses. It's not consumer grade.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Addressable_Lighting_Interface
One thing I noticed when LED street lamps first started showing up, was that the quality of light was different, not just the colour. The old sodium vapour lamps cast a very diffuse light that seemed to spread everywhere. This was bad for light polution, but better for safety, because it allowed you to see effectively in the dark. The new LED lamps seem to cast a spotlight downward, which is better for light pollution, but means that you can't see anything when not directly underneath one.
The first LED street lights had a very spotty output, but the modern ones have quite complex lenses to cast a wide beam along the road.
Our village has been slowly converting to LED. There's one lamp that's above a tree branch and the shadow / lit area below shows the individual LEDS, it looks like a bunch of squares. Move noticeable when there's a bit of wind.
Some of these LED street lamps on rural roads are terrifying - they make it almost impossible to see the difference between grass verge and the type of road surface they use in Lincolnshire. It's possible to just drive into a ditch on a sharp bend if there are no other road signs warning you of the bend which is quite common on single and narrow carriageway country lanes.
Might be a function of age in my case but on a recent occasion I returned to an led lit airport car park late at night and really struggled to see the zone signs let alone my car!
@@charliesoffer The pair of LED driving lights I installed on my Tojo make for excellent spotting of the Roos etc at the road edges. However the savage reflections as you pass road signs tend to periodically blind you!
Street lamps that change intensity and color temperature automatically to suit various weather conditions would be great. Personally I prefer sodium color.
yeah cold white leds are a pain to the eye.
years ago i experimented with this. i used a 10W sky blue led with a 10W 2200K yellow. one faded into the other with pwm from 555 timer. mid setting looked like real lightbulb light.
something like that could work automatically with a fog detector, etc. inside a street fixture.
yellow increases visibility through fog. i never built the detector, but i found out cops are interested in color changing lights on regular cars. project cancelled. 😞
It would be easier with sodium at night - there's a pretty long underground passage where I live, and I dread it every time I drive through - they really overdid the number of LED lights and it's blinding - by the time I exit it's hard to see pedestrians even in front of my headlights...
In those connectors, both sides are spring connectors, one side has a convenient button to release the wire, but on the side where you cut the wires, the spring must be released with a tool, e.g. Fluke T150 measuring probe fits well.
The entire housing, is the heatsink... I've had a couple different models, much larger and brighter that I got fired up. Love them...
You know it's good, when Clive gets perplexed 👍
PIC probably only draws a milliamp or two, so low voltage supply is probably a linear regulator with that warm MOSFET
I may revisit it. I was a bit jaded at the time and didn't go as deep as normal.
Yeah, that's precisely what crossed my mind. I've powered PICs that way.
Haven't watched one of Clive's vids for ages and had forgotten how excellent they are [not being paid in any way here :-) ] He's a bit like an OS map : so much information packed into such a small compact time-space and easily understandable even to the uninitiated - and that's a skill!! Can't believe he hasn't been approached by some sort of college/uni/lecturing faculty... always best to have someone who's actually *_done_* the darned job. Those who have a endured a training course will know what I mean when I say that you can always spot the one's who never *_actually_* did the job.
You get the sense of him enjoying the process, not just the transfer of knowledge.
“Oi Bert, we’ve got an order for one lamp and pole”.
“What’s that Fred? a hundred or a thousand”?
Fred: “one, just one, the guy must want his own personal streetlight”.
🤣
I love the idea of the mailman showing up with a 20' long package looking very annoyed, and Clive realizing the pole was included XD
Clive - thank you for that. Fascinating. So much engineering goes unnoticed in everyday things like this - its fascinating to get such a teardown. Much appreciated.
Perfect retrofit solution for a change as when you are at the top of a Van Mounted inspection lift it can be like an Alton Towers ride in the wind and you want to get the job done quickly
Big Clive appreciation comment!
Been subscribed for about a year now. Was less than a noob when I first found his channel. I've learnt so much. Grateful for people like Big Clive 🙏
Fascinating and elegant design. I've never heard of DALI before -a seemingly simple but appropriate solution.
I hear DALI and I immediately think of a streetlight designed by Salvador Dali...
@@tncorgi92 I admit it 'momentarily' went through my mind as well 🤣
Interesting video. The one question I have about led lights is why they don't generally put frosted diffuser over them as the matrix of point sources leaves retina effects after a direct glance. My local swimming pool put up these huge flood lights to replace the florescent tubes. They were awful so I complained & they replaced the lens with a frosted version.
Living in Berlin which still has quite a few gas lamps, I have come to appreciate them. They have a very brilliant light and the color reproduction, especially for photography, is wonderfully perfect
With the benefit of hindsight or by RTFM at 12:05 we see the 4 wires that we did not need to cut in order to change the LED panel and we then retain the lens and heatsink bits but hay ho ! and the live neutral and earth were in the right order...fine video and nice interesting item...cheers.
Last video we had gloves, this time we've got power tools.
Clive's going all Hollywood, it'll be an interesting journey 😁
Soon he will have a Nintendo Power Glove :-)
Hooray for clivey wood.
I have worked on the pototype assembeling line of those devices. Never knew they actually made it into the real world.
I installed about 2000 Italian sourced LED street lights. That was a fun job and it had a controller on top which meant each individual light could be controlled.
Always interesting to watch these videos as this is the side of the industry I don't have experience in. There's a lot of crossover with electronic and electrical equipment be it domestic or commercial. Far more than there was say 30 years ago.
Very advanced indeed! I'd love to see more content about the DT3007B chips. I had a look at a datasheet and saw it found it very interesting.
Thank you, Clive, my, but things have progressed since my days of playing with 90W SOX fittings in the '70s! The NEMA Photocells had Bi-metal strips in them to provide the 1-minute purge delay in those days, and the 'safe' way to dispose of the lamps was using a metal dustbin full of water and a rock!
You desk sounds like mine with all the sliding and crunching noises while moving stuff around, lol. Thanks for the video Clive.
Thanks for explaining DALI. As a theatre guy, I know DMX well enough that I could probably bit-bang it if I had to. First spotted DALI helping a customer with their house lighting -- they weren't using it, but it was supported by the fixtures. The rectifier explains why I never saw a polarity indicator.
amazing. learned a lot from this video. i think this may be the most sophisticated on/off light switch i have ever seen
Imagine doing this up a pole. Taking out the corner plates and letting em go ping down the hoist...
Yes this was very much my thoughts, in the wind, on a wobbly cherry picker.......that is not my kind of serviceable.
A lost of lamp posts are hinged near the base so they can be lowered and worked on at ground level.
@@TheEulerIDI remember that from Thomas Nagy's channel.
That NEMA connector is interesting. It's similar to the NEMA L-series twist-lock connectors (e.g., the NEMA L5 connectors often used in North America for stage lighting, also commonly found at RV parks and marinas, or the NEMA L6 connectors frequently used for 208V or 240V connections in server rooms.) But it's not the same as any of those. It must have been-designed specifically for the ANSI C136.41 streetlight dimming specification.
The main thing I remember when they put in the LED street around here was the shadows cast the dappled lamplight and many shadows that came from the lighting.
Instead of one...
you got this array of you got a multi shadows super cool and I still like it.
I do miss the orange a little bit
Pre-set dimming - the lights on our street do that, at 00:00 they dim to 50% brightness then at 05:00 return to 100% brightness before going off at sunrise. That spec sheet gives the impression it's programmed at the head for each light which would mean they have a concept of time some how? I always thought it was just a signal through the DALI network from a central controller to enable/disable the dim mode as every light on the street does it within seconds of each other.
Some have a central control with wireless link and others just use the duration of darkness to calculate a rough time.
Thanks for this video. A nicely manufactured unit!
Well, this is a surprise. I immediately recognised the logo as belonging to the Spanish Parastatal INDO (Industria Nacional de Óptica). Its core business is the manufacture and supply of frames, lenses and contacts to the Spanish retail optician sector. I was not expecting such industrial applications. I grew up wearing INDO glasses.
How we've done infrastructure elements is to have on hand more than the in-service quantity. That way you swap units out as needed then service them and return to the inventory.
I have seen these type of light fixtures around a village i walk through at night and they turn on by motion detection.
Just as i approached it turned on,so the detector must angled. An impressive design.
The other side of the quick connector is actually relatively easy to remove the wires from if you use an extraction tool/rotate the wires but not something you want to be doing at height.
Once the mains cable has been unplugged, the lamp can be removed and taken back to the city depot where module unplugging can be done .
Decent build! Important is the corrosion resistance in damp or wet or British conditions (Germany as well, of course).
Have to say that I did a double take when I saw the power factor on the Hopi - I wasn't expecting that! I think that the last phrase sums things up nicely "well engineered" rather than "half copied" or "cobbled together from a datasheet" which is what happens with a lot of other products.
Yeah, it's a ridiculously good power factor.
Indo's website has some good information on why the fitting is built as it is.
Where I live, they switched from sodium lights to leds, but then the phosphor coating started peelong off of the led chips. It left them giving off crazy bright blue/uv, so they went back to the sodium lights.
where do you live? .. here (scotland) the council has clearly went through several phases of led lighting from the early crap to what now is , ohnestly pretty decent.
@denisohbrien I'm in Wisconsin, northern US. About a month after the leds were installed you'd see one or two each block that had failed. Then in the winter, after a cold snap (-25c) about 2/3 were missing the coating.
It's also some kind of phosphor failure at making yellow/green/red light, not just peeling.
Quite a shift from halogen . Interesting . No joke , when I was young I could walk down a street lined with halogen street lights and as I walked under one it would go out . For real ! Those lights were at the top of ,maybe , a 30ft pole . To this day I still can not figure out what was going on there . Anyway , as always Clive..Nice breakdown . :O)
Brilliant looking light Clive, looks incredibly well made too thank you 😊
It’s fascinating to see how complicated streetlights have become! Can’t help feeling that the way the streets where I used to live is far simpler maintenance wise (literally just 40W bare bulbs with rusty shades over them - and probably not earthed at all).
The earthing is still very random.
where I live in the UK, the council are now fitting orange and red led streetlights rather than the white ones, the red ones take some getting used to
You live in a red-light district?
@@cncshrops haha 😆
I wonder if they are red phosphor LEDs or traditional gallium arsenide ones. They would last a very long time.
What a cool device. I'd love to see one of these running on a high speed camera to see the individual LED's running thru their cycles. Would be really interesting.
To quote Jurassic Park: "Spared no expense". One hell of a piece of engineering and manufacturing right there. A world of difference from the Chinesium you often deal with!
Wow that's amazing 😮 and yeah the amount of different devices available in SOT23 makes reverse engineering really difficult at times, great video as always 😎
I think with the LED street lights sometimes being a bit dimmer, dog food manufactures should be made to add a glow in the dark material. Just to make it a bit more obvious where the💩💩 are.🤣🤣 very interesting light I was thinking, a few years ago it would have been so expensive to buy a street light for teardown, but now with China churning them out by the millions the price and availability to us non-street light workers we can all have a look at them 2x👍
considéring glowing algues and bacteria, à possible sensitivity to free air, I.can see a few ways to.do it without being toxic.
Bro you are going to get so many different dog food ads now
Surely not...
Didn’t consider this. Just came back in. The old high pressure sodium, surely, showed the dog poo way better. Agreed.
@dcallan812
Don't walk your dog in the dark.!
Very well-made unit, Thanks for your Indepth analyses Clive. 230k Hours, they are dreaming. The driver will fail well before that.
No electrolytic capacitors, so that's a promising sign.
I have had some reasonable success with a straightened out paperclip when releasing cables from push in terminals, I often used to change the HF ballasts on fluorescent light fittings when they failed rather than replace the whole fitting and although I didn't need to re-use the connector on the old ballast it did leave the cables full length.
I found a possible correlation between those ACRICH3 controllers and the NEMA devices. The NEMA devices are capable of using 0-10V (or 1-10V) protocol, plus others, as well as DALI. I wonder if the 0-10V protocol can be used to talk directly to the ACRICH3 controllers. That would certainly make it possible to simplify the circuitry, clearly not in this case though.
That was a trip! Great explornation!
There was a lot more on that circuit board that I was expecting!
I found one of those NEMA modules in the road the other day. I was wondering what it was and where it had come from. Now I know. One of the street lights has lost its dusk sensor.
I was involved in a project where we plug a controller into the nema socket that piggy backs onto the RF home power meter network so it could be dimmed during the middle of the night, report consumption, life etc - even a gps location which sounds daft but is in fact to confirm it's exact location when installed which is important.
I am rather surprised at the complexity of this light...very neat!
Much simpler than many of the separate LED drivers.
you have to see the street led unit i have. its got a massive control box, funky cap think on the top (like the one in clives video) and 44leds. it's a beast for REALLY tall poles on main roads. 400v but i put a 13amp household plug on it and it runs perfectly.... except ... it only stays on 5 minutes test period and turns itself off. i suppose there must be a dusk sensor in it like clive showed, or some kind of timer/ wireless controlled network?
Awesomely designed street light! Very high end. Thanks for your hard work Clive. Very interesting stuff 🤔👍
Nice street light fixture, a compact "driverless" COB LED. Components galore, one can only imagine what's coming next to further complicate the interior of an electric light source nowadays. Quite interesting, but I too still prefer HPS as night light. Curious how insects loved the older discharge tech, mercury and sodium, swarming around the lamps, but just a fraction is attracted to Leds.
Cheers 💡
You can disconnect the wires (on the side without the buttons) by holding and pulling the wire with one hand while twisting the connector back and forth with the other hand.
Sorry for the spam I used to watch your videos long time ago I been somewhat busy n I just checked out sense I seen a short happy to see you doing good interesting tools n some fun things always on this channel thanks for the content
An intriguing power supply design, as you say. Two very high power mosfets but seemingly no switcher or inductor. Perhaps just a simple on-off and that's why at least one is getting hot.
The ones I worked on had different beam patterns for different application. Especially for things like pedestrian crossings.
And no electrolytics!
As they say in their blurb - that's what usually fail so they designed them out.
Impressive unit. 🙂
well noticed, on a similar subject would anyone reading this have any advice for me, I'm replacing the capacitors on a couple of led light fittings (400V 15uF 130degree electrolytic). What type or brand would make an economic but long-lived repair - is there a reason to replace with electrolytics or can i use one of the other types without issue?
@@Derek_Garnham Main caveat I know is that ceramic capacitors can lose a lot of capacitance with increasing DC bias. Personally I prefer to replace electrolytics with electrolytics, but get a top quality brand (usually Rubycon or Panasonic) and if available a higher temperature and/or voltage rating (for a light fitting I rate temperature more important than voltage, but I choose both when I can).
@@CoastalSphinx Thanks for your input, you've also reminded me that the job is still waiting to be done :)
Interesting brand name! When I think about bright LEDs and the word "Indo", I'm not immediately thinking about streetlights
We were installing something called an LPC. I also used the shorting cap at various times.
So well made and thought out.
Has a very good powerfactor too!
Nice to have a video where the summary is that it isn't very cheap and crap!
From their website on a similar model : " A temperature dependent soft start feature should be deployed to protect against LED failures at low temperatures". Cold day, perhaps.
Even when it's a completely boring and not interesting thing to me, whenever Clive sits down and starts talking about it - I can't stop listening.
Don't know how you do it. Must be the secret which brought your channel over 1M subscribers without ritual words «like and subscribe».
Some LED street lamps have motion sensors in them that makes them brighter when they detect movement.
It makes it harder to do a sneaky approach on a street.
Some have cameras, Infrared, AI sound sensor systems that detect sounds like cries and gunshots or car crashes. Even that isn't shit anymore because any of those can trigger drone surveillance in a neighborhood. The US is so screwed lmao
I found out that some of the street lights close to where I live have that feature (I wondered why the lights seemed to get brighter as I passed under them)
The fun part of the 0-10V Control pins of many LED drivers is, that they often can be driven directly from a microcontroller using PWM as I noticed. No need for 10V in your circuit then
Oh to hear Clive gushing over the LED sequencing and the resulting power factor!
Reminds me of the streetlight unit I got off ebay a few years back, a 30-watt 6000k job which I made non-functional trying to take it to bits, though it was a dumb light, no NEMA socket, DALI or dimming stuff, just a DOB LED panel that was rather bright before someone rather dim broke it... :P
8:48 either use a tbin screwdriver to release some blade (there are many holes ) or turn the cable to pull it, or just change the connector with the led.
This looks very well made. I don't suppose anyone would bother repairing these. The 'Electricians' would just change the head and weigh the old head in for scrap.
You mean the G39 light fitters. A stunningly shallow one day slideshow that instantly qualifies unskilled labour to work on outdoor electrical equipment.
@@bigclivedotcom you think thats shallow, I was in a training centre in edinburgh today, and they had a whole room dedicated to forklift training .. now i have worked in and around warehouses all my days and never met a forklift operator with a license to do so, to a point where i presumed there wasn't one . atleast these guys get training to change a bulb.
@@denisohbrien Here across the North see a lot of job ads list a requirement for a forklift drivers license and job placement agencies often send the unemployed on a forklift training course, because it's a cheap form of "upqualification" .
The city by me is replacing the blue LEDs installed by the state and replacing them with yellow LEDs that are being tested by clear skys to see if there's less light pollution, (so far the answer is yes)one thing thats interesting is on a pedestrian path the lighs are motion sensing, squirrels and cats don't trip them but Dog's and Foxes do. Some people didn't like the dark paths saying oh someone could hide him inside of the bushes and I won't see them while they wait for the light to go off but the weird thing is when there's no lights on you actually see the people hanging outside of the path better than with the lights on.
Just have them light up at a low level when no motion is sensed. I've seen examples (to conserve power on solar/battery) that do it, and it could be applied to regular streetlighting.
Almost to good to leave laying around. Do you need external lighting?
I'm tempted to put it up on a bracket.
The light sensor on the board is probably only sensitive to IR light. Ce:YAG/InGaN LEDs make very little IR, so the fixture is blind to its own light.
You would think the led module would just unplug after removing the 4 brackets holding it on.
So it still has to be taken from the lamp post for servicing.
Gaz Yorkshire.
Was the different power on sequence you saw related to temperature? One feature this light has is a temperature dependent soft start feature to protect against LED failures at low temperatures.
You should try to get ahold of one of those fancy radiowave bike/pedestrian road crossing sensors. They are all over my area and ive always wondered exactly how they work
I looked at a pedestrian sensor in a video. It used an array of projected infrared dots to detect changes.
I wonder why they didn't go for a WAGO style, completely demountable connector system, especially in view of the very low power consumption?
I just wish they would put a small, possibly reflective, shroud around the edges to direct the light down below horizontal more. It would help cut down the point source glare.
That looks like a traditional series linear regulator setup. Probably used because it’s more reliable than anything else - as long as the zener is properly rated, it’ll last forever.
I make the Australian version of these street lights, ours use 4x 90v banks of DOB leds without smart circuits, theyve been going good for years lol
Nice streetlight and I see it came with a Westire AcRo photocell.A very good low Lux economical photocell.
I wonder if the width of the beam can be tweaked by switching between the LEDs with different lenses.
I thought YT recommended me a video i have already watched wuth a grey lamp but title differed so i clicked and was welcomed with another construction :)
Some time back I had to design a DALI master, which supplies the power and controls everything. It was a real pain because, at least back then, the voltage levels defining a '1' and a '0' overlapped! You had to figure out what the current idle high voltage was (dependent on how much the slaves were drawing) and then generate your 0/1 crossing from there. I would up using edge detection as easier.
Design hint: never overlap 0 and 1 voltages!
The plug you cut the wires may have a small hole that you insert a pin in to release the wire
Wonder if the coil plus 8 pin chip is for an optional RFID programmable but I2C accessed EEPROM containing settings. e.g. the STMicroelectonics ST25 family.
Maybe a Signify ballast programming system.
Very illuminating.
Looks like the main connector was marked as if it was a 4 way, for instance, live, switch live, neutral, earth
Maybe in a line of lights, just one of them has a dali capable sensor that brings all the lights on at the same time, useful where some lights may be shaded by trees etc.
You can remove the wires from that piano key connector without cutting them, you need to insert a pin in the hole above where the wires enter the connector. This will then release the wire.
Yes I was supprised Clive didn't know that.
I tried that and it didn't release.
I'd really love to know the specs on that Littelfuse surge suppressor? These things are so important. Not much point having a lifetime rating of hundreds of thousands if the electricity supply does it in much sooner. It's not just trash from other lights. It's localised surges from lightning, plus some areas have other sources of surges (industrial equipment etc).
I don't see much use for Dali here in Czechia. Cities have limited budgets so they usually replace only the light fixtures and keep the old poles and cables. In some places, there are cables from 50s still in use. Also the pohotocell sockets are not a thing here. Streetlights are swictehd centally from the switchboard using a contactor controlled by a clock.
The Dali can be used from the photocell base as an RF link.
In supermarket coolers, the LEDs dim until a body moves in front of them and then ramp up in brightness.
Way cool and somewhat creepy at the same time.
Great thing about LEDs is that they withstand frequent switching very well.
That said at my supermarket the lights go out all the way in the freezer cases and turn on with a loud CLICK when approached.