How to Overclock 60Hz chinese Christmas LED to 120Hz? - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / beginners

author: Undweeber
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: November 05, 2019, 09:43:01 pm
content: 1. Bought these lights from amazonhttps://www.amazon.com/JMEXSUSS-Christmas-Wedding-Decoration-Approved/dp/B07CFWX1VY/2. Was afraid they would flicker, and to my misfortune they have horrible flicker3. At first I thought it was a shitty PWM controller, so I stuck a 32V capacitor in parallel, which shorted out the circuit, however, during blinking mode where half of the lights are on and off with dimming, it worked, but only half of the lights would turn on/off and it was smooth without flickering so capacitor solved half of the problem4. what capacitor revealed is much worse than a shitty PWM controller, the transformer/adapter basically uses 2 lines, as switching + and - DC, effectively AC, to drive half of the LED's on and the other half off, the problem is, it takes 60Hz and basically flickers each half of the LED's at 30Hz to which I am literally allergic, I get migraine. I imagine if the adapter first converted 60Hz to 120Hz, making each half of the circuit flicker at 60Hz I would not be able to see the flickering, but the adapter is garbage, and I am absolutely baffled that in 2019 such garbage is being made.5. I found this articlehttps://blog.1000bulbs.com/home/what-are-full-wave-led-christmas-lightswhich in its own way explains a similar effect, although very simplistically and generally.1.Could it have been possible to fix the flickering using an AC capacitor like one inside the microwave?2.One of the modes can LOCK ON half of the LED's, this mode DOES NOT FLICKER, is there anything I can do to use this mode and drive the full circuit, please refer to my sketch and tell me if there is anything I could do at the last LED like adding a rectifier or something to drive the other half of the circuit, i tried a few things unsuccessfully, if there isn't an easy fix i will be returning it.3. Suggest LED christmas lights that don't flicker please, my incandescent died for no reason and I have no clue how to go through 100 incandescent to check each one, they are super hard to pull out.

author: magic
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 06, 2019, 06:26:45 am
content: There is no way that 50 LEDs in series run from 30V. It would take more like 100~150V.You said something about dimming and blinking, so perhaps the controller just switches mains voltage to them with a TRIAC.Ideally you should connect the two chains in series and double the input voltage. But you can't easily do that, so perhaps try wiring them in parallel and see if they share current equally and get close to equal brightness. Beware that this will draw twice the current from the controller, so a good question is what's inside of that box?Quote from: Undweeber on November 05, 2019, 09:43:01 pmA relatively smart but still somewhat brute force way:see which end goes to line and which goes to neutralpull the bulb in the middle, if it gets voltage, the fault is towards the neutral end, if not, it's toward the line endpull the bulb in the middle of the faulty half and dittoA really lazy way: buy/borrow a contactless voltage detector. I presume it would work, unless there are multiple cables braided together and only one has a fault.

author: grifftech
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: November 07, 2019, 03:30:05 pm
content: could also be the fuse in the plug (even in the USA)