MemeCode - Blog

The Franken-Bear-Light

Date: 17/7/2006

As you might be aware I have 2 kids, 3 1/2 and 2 years old. And we have 2 "bear lights", which are night lights in the shape of a teddy bear. They have a timer mode to switch them off after a while and a 2 monophonic tunes they can play. And of course our little ones love them, "bear light daddy!" is the cry if I forget to turn them on.

Some months ago first one and then the other started playing up, in that they'd turn themselves off for a while in the middle of the night, at which point if the child noticed they would cry out and wake us up. (We don't use the auto off mode). This will not do at all.

So after last night's wake up call I decided it's time. Time to hack. So I opened one of them up and it's got all this circuitry inside. I tried to step my way through it with a multi-meter and well I'm not an electrical engineer so all those IC's and transistors were over my head.

I gave up on understanding the original circuit and ripped all the active components out, and using a basic light circuit someone thoughtlessly left lying around on the intarweb I cobbled together a working light using the main variable resistor / switch as a dimmer and a resister of roughly the right value I found on the PCB. I drilled some holes in the plastic casing, mounted the pot back on the body of the unit with tiny bolts and screwed it all back together. I'm quite proud of my first ever circuit design... be it simple as it is.

Beware the franken-bear-light!

Comments:

Ed
21/07/2006 6:39am

"...at which point if the child noticed they would cry out and wake us up. (We don't use the auto off mode)"

The kids have an "auto-off" mode and you don't use it?

I just don't get some people!

fret
21/07/2006 1:49pm

I think someone wants to baby sit for the night. :P

From:

Email (optional):

(Will be HTML encoded to evade harvesting)

Message:

Remember username and/or email in a cookie. Notify me of new posts in this thread via email.	BBcode: [q]text[/q] [url=link]description[/url] [img]url_to_image[/img] [pre]some_code[/pre] [b]bold_text[/b]

Sitemap