My 5 Cents

Hey guys,

it´s me again, having another defective gadget, i do not want to throw away. 

So, this is a LED Christmas star, which is battery driven and just has an RGB LED, that changes colors slowly, though giving a very warm christmas feeling.

Problem is, this thing is made so cheap, the cable, connecting the LED to the controller has no strain relief, so the cable just broke. 

Now i had to get the glued LED out of the polymer star without destroying it. This I did with a little drill, going into the middle of the LED and getting slowly to bigger sizes. In the end, i used a 10 mm drill and now the replacement LED fits in just nicely. 

Do not make the hole too big, as the new LED needs to be glued in again. I just used a heat glue pistol. That worked fine for me. 

I took this RGB LED as a replacement, but the important thing is that they have a common anode, not a common cathode. 

https://www.highlight-led.de/10-leds-5mm-wasserklar-rgb-4-polig-steuerbar-set.html

Next thing was soldering the cables directly to the LED, but do not forget to think about the strain relief before.

Then I made sure the cable has a strain relief by a combination of  4 small shrink tubings covering each single pin of the LED, then folding the cable twice over the already heated small shrink tube performing an 8 and fixing it in place with a bigger shrink tube over all 4 pin connections at once.  

​Now works like a charm again and giving us warm Christmas feelings. Another gadget saved from waste.

cheers 

Frank